Re: hash-table-{to, from}-alist

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ted Zlatanov writes:

 > Can you and Stefan figure out whether to have print-readably or
 > not?  I was against it, and Stefan supported that.  But let's see
 > the pro argument and discuss this.

The pro argument is that unless you're debugging the hash table, it's
a PITA to have a hash table that gets recursively passed to each
function down the line taking up 20 screens for each frame in a
backtrace.  "Not debugging the hash table" is the overwhelmingly
common occurance for me; usually I'm more interested in where in the
stack the value I'm going to be puthash'ing turned from gold into
garbage.  OTOH, about half the time when I've got a chartable in the
stack, the chartable is buggy (in my experience almost all chartables
are write-once).

 > Will the current state of things cause XEmacs breakage anywhere?

No.  This is a user interface thing.  If I'm right, XEmacs will get a
mild popularity boost if you always print the hash table.  I'm not
going to complain about that! ;-)

 > One idea I had is to check if print-readably is bound; if not then
 > we act as if it was bound and t.  That will DTRT in GNU Emacs and
 > in XEmacs, I hope.

Hm?  XEmacs already has the feature in C; your code will either get
ignored in XEmacs syncs, or its algorithms will be ported to our C
code.  Definitely not something for you to worry about.