Re: hash tables: print, read, print-readably

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: Ah, well that explains a lot of the disconnect here. The Lisp books that I have say very little about what can go inside #<>, which suggests to me that this is an XEmacs policy, rather than some well-known aspect of Lisp. If that's true, then the policy should be documented in the docstring of #'print and friends. But I really have to question whether this is a wise policy. A strict interpretation implies I should ignore the buffer name in #<buffer "*scratch*"> If I want to know the name of a buffer, I should make a practice of using #'buffer-name. That seems awkward. And talk about attractive nuisances... A more lenient interpretation would say I can use the fields that seem reliable enough. But figuring out, then keeping track of, which fields of which types are reliable would be a hassle. Either way, the application programmer loses. That said, I can see the writing on the wall. I'm not going to invest any additional time lobbying for change in this area. mike _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta