Re: list-print-separator

[Stefan Monnier]

>>> With my list-print-separator patch you get fast and OK-looking.
>>> Are you concerned it's only useful sometimes?  The speed penalty is
>>> minor if it's not used.
SM> I'd rather make `pp' faster, or if it's too difficult split it into
SM> a "print-really-pretty" and "print-quickly-and-not-too-ugly".
> The users most likely to benefit, at least for Gnus where I have
> experience supporting them, are those who can't read ELisp well.  They
> are also less likely to complain or roll their own solution.

I'm not sure how that relates: what I propose is for Gnus to call
print-quickly-and-not-too-ugly and that would be done by people who know
Elisp fairly well.  The users who don't know Elisp well would not need
to know that the file was printed via this function rather than via
`print'.

> So I hope you see that this is not a "print pretty" request but a real
> need for any package that uses ELisp's build-in serialization.
> I'm concerned that your "good enough" solution will not be adopted
> because it will be much slower than the native `print' serialization,
> and optimizing it is much more work than my proposed patch of 4 lines.

I'm not convinced it's difficult to write
a print-quickly-and-not-too-ugly that's reasonably fast.  Admittedly,
reasonably fast may still be too slow, but in that case I'd rather just
use an ugly print out than try to make `print's output prettier or
more customizable.


        Stefan


PS: you could also add a -*- mode: ugly-sexp -*- cookie in the
newsrc.eld file so that when a user opens it for reading it can easily
(automatically?) be prettified.