Re: prettyprinting

[John R. Ellis <Ellis at YALE>]

ELLISP uses a very well written pretty printer from MIT (I forget right
now who wrote it).  It is fast enough and robust enough so that it is
the default printer in ELLISP (amazing how your work habits change when
things are always printed out pretty).  Some of its features are:

    optional circularity detection
    list length elision
    nesting elision
    fairly powerful extensibility
    optional printing of lists in columns (does pretty well).

When Ruttenberg and I first got GPRINT, we were able to write a print
method for GPRINT that handled records (structures) in less than an hour;
with another hour of work, we made it really pretty.

GPRINT is by far the best pretty printer I have seen; why settle for less?
GPRINT is written in fairly clean Maclisp (sources in
[RES]<C.S.ELLISP>GPRINT.LSP).  It should be only a day or two's work to
port it to T.  If you're interested in how well it does, see an ELLISP
user for a demo, or run ELLISP yourself.
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