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Printing DEFSTRUCTs



The standard way of printing structures involves printing out all
the slots in #S notation.  The Common Lisp manual requires that
structures print in this way unless the user specifies his own
printing function in his structure definition (page 370).  I don't think
that this is a very useful way of printing structures, since a lot of
structures are circular, and even those that aren't tend to be large in
any program that isn't a toy.

I would prefer that the default way of printing structures be changed to
be more useful (for instance the way ZetaLisp DEFSTRUCTs used to print,
which was as "#<SHIP 7765321>").  A less-preferable solution would
involve a global variable that controls how structures default to
printing.


					Ramin