Re: Elisp printer

[Stefan Monnier]

> Does "cl" stand for "command line" or for "Common Lisp"?

It's for "Common Lisp", since it uses the Common Lisp names and
calling conventions (as well as reliance on CLOS).

> I find the name hard to remember in both cases, because that's not
> what comes to my mind when I think of this library (when
> I internet-search for "cl-print", I find mostly shops that print
> business cards and such stuff...)

It would probably make sense to get rid of the "cl-" prefix at some
point, but that will cause `cl-prin1` and `prin1` to collide, so it
would require to merge the two somehow.  We might want to do it down the
road, but I figured it as better to move forward with a separate name
space so we don't have to solve that problem before we can use the
new functionality.

> Anyway, we really really need to define a printer for thunk.el thunks,
> and maybe an extra printer for streams (that's why I CC Nicolas), and
> probably some similar other stuff!

If you look in the cl-print.el I installed into the master branch,
you'll see it already has support for printing advice objects, so it
should be fairly easy to use the same approach to add support for
thunks, streams, iterators, ... (and contrary to what I did for advice,
that support can be placed in thunk.el, stream.el, ...).  Basically, the
question is to figure out how to *recognize* those functions.


        Stefan


PS: I wish we could have funcallable defstructs, so we could
    efficiently dispatch on the "type" of functions when those functions
    are used as objects.