Printing Arrays

[Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>]

At the 8/21 meeting someone (Weinreb, maybe?) was arguing that we ought
to have "Mulit-D vectors", by which he meant arrays that would print out
in a simple readable format.  The :PRINT proposal is an attempt to deal
with this issue, but since I don't understand quite what uses were
envisioned for these things, I can't decide whether it is OK for these
things just to print in a format that displays their elements and
dimensions, but not details like whether the element-type is restricted.
If the desire is just to have an array that people can examine, and that
reads back in to something EQUALP to the original, that is easy to do;
if the applications require that the printed object reads back in and
turns into the exact same type-restricted form that we started with,
things get ugly.  I think the idea was just to have a class of arrays
that were easy to look at, and I will proceed on that assumption in
revising the array proposal -- if I'm wrong about this, somebody had
better speak up pretty soon.

-- Scott