Re: visible hash tables

[Skef.Wholey@SPICE.CS.CMU.EDU]

    From: Jon L White <edsel!jonl@labrea.stanford.edu>

    [...] there a whole slew of potential (or real) data types in CLtL for
    which there is no commonly accepted print syntax [...]  BYTE-SPECIFIER
    comes to mind, as well as RANDOM-STATE, PATHNAME, [...] and non-simple
    ARRAY and ARRAY with specialized element-type [...]

    Lucid, like Symbolics, already uses the #P"..." approach to pathnames
    [...]
    
    [...] hash-tables have two additional interesting properties beyond the
    :type and :size -- the :rehash-size and :rehash-threshold.  Hash-tables
    wouldn't be fully reconstructable from the printed format unless this
    information were also included.

Ok, Crazy 3:39 AM Idea: CMU-CL prints pathnames out as #.(pathname
"/usr/foo/bar").  I think this was done as a quick hack to satisfy the
requirement that pathnames print out readably, and that the writer of
that code had never seen the #P syntax.  BUT: the idea of using #. in
printing could be incorporated to preserve such things as array element
type in array printing.  Then, if things like Make-Hash-Table were to be
modified to take :Initial-Elements keyword args, ala Make-Array, the
problem of preserving things like Rehash-Size and Rehash-Threshold could
be easily solved in a consistent, centralized way, using the
user-visible construction functions rather than a bizzare extension to
#S, which would have many weird special cases to document and implement.
One can (if one tries) envision a super printer switch,
*Print-It-Like-It-Is*, which would cause things to print out in an ugly
but information-laden way, preserving all the things that (we think)
ought to be preserved.

Now, it would be especially neato if *Print-It-Like-It-Is* printed
things in a \portable/ way, so that a hash table (or pathname!) printed
under Lucid CL could be read by any other CL.  #P is obviously not
portable.  (What use would people have in wanting pathnames to be
portable?  Well, just today I heard a user ask a CMU-CL implementor
about having Lucid CL on a Sun talk to CMU-CL on an RT.  Among other
things, these two Lisps share the same network file system, and so
passing pathnames back and forth is a sensible thing...)

--Skef