[Openmcl-devel] level-1/l1-boot-2.lisp

[Sudhir Shenoy]

I am definitely not an expert on CL but ... My reading of the *print-readably* spec is that the default behaviour is the non-special one, i.e., when set to 't', *print-readably* behaves in a special way that ensures what is printed can be read back by the implementation. So, I guess the standard read/print behaviour is one where what is printed can be read back and this is the "special" behaviour when *print-readably* is true.

My head hurts as well :-)

On Mar 29, 2010, at 6:23 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

> And the same spec says that WITH-STANDARD-IO-SYNTAX binds *PRINT-READABLY*
> to T (and that that produces "standard read/print behavior".)  Perhaps that
> means that "standard behavior" and "default behavior" intentionally differ.
> 
> I wouldn't want to have to explain that (just thinking about it is hard
> enough ...), so it's probably better that threads start up with "default,
> though perhaps non-standard" values of the reader/printer control variables.
> 
> The change was motivated by a desire to keep an assignment to one of those
> variables in one thread from unexpectedly affecting the value visible in
> another thread.  That's generally a good thing (even though that kind of
> assignment isn't generally a Good Idea), but it does mean that setting
> something (something like *PRINT-PRETTY*) in your init file doesn't have exactly the same (generally benign) effect that it had before the change.
> 
> On Mon, 29 Mar 2010, Sudhir Shenoy wrote:
> 
>> In the latest change to l1-boot-2.lisp, shouldn't the value for *print-
>> readably* be set to nil? SLIME breaks with it set to 't' and according
>> to the Hyperspec, the default value of *print-readably* is false ...
>> 
>> Cheers
>> Sudhir
>> 
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