[Masinter.pa: Re: questions]

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: 21 Jul 88 08:20 PDT
    From: Masinter.pa@Xerox.COM
    In-reply-to: chapman%aitg.DEC@decwrl.dec.com's message of 19 Jul 88 13:55

	On page 354, "When the @xlisp printer types out the name of a
	special character, it uses the same table as the @f[#\] reader;
	therefore any character name you see typed out is acceptable as
	input (in that implementation).  Standard names are always
	preferred over non-standard names for printing."
	I'd like to change the last sentence to read "... are required
	over non-...".  Do you see a problem with that?

    Well, I thought preferred was put there for a reason, and I can imagine
    situations where a short-name might be preferred (the case I have in mind is
    NewLine. If you're running on a system that talks both to cr and lf based file
    systems, you might want to emphasize #\cr #\lf vs #\newline.) 

Symbolics Genera is an example of exactly such a system.  Our user interface
standards require us to print #\Return rather than #\Newline for this character.

In general Common Lisp is weak on portability of the output of the PRINT function.
Adding a new feature to produce output from one implementation that is guaranteed
to be readable by all other implementations might be a good idea, but I think
it raises a lot more issues than just the names-of-characters issue.