A Common Lisp Pretty Printing System

Abstract

XP provides efficient and flexible support for pretty printing in Common Lisp. Its single greatest advantage is that it allows the full benefits of pretty printing to be obtained when printing data structures, as well as when printing program code. XP is efficient, because it is based on a linear time algorithm that uses only a small fixed amount of storage. XP is flexible, because users can control the exact form of the output via a set of special format directive. XP can operate on arbitrary data structures, because facilities are provided for specifying pretty printing methods for any type of object. XP also modifies the way abbreviation based on length, nesting depth, and circularity is supported so that they automatically apply to user-defined functions that perform output-e.g., print functions for structures. In addition, a new abbreviation mechanism is introduced that can be used to limit the total number of lines printed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1989
Accession Number
ADA208215

Entities

People

  • Richard C. Waters

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Compilers
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Programming
  • Debugging
  • Detection
  • Directives
  • Efficiency
  • Hash Tables
  • High Level Language Architecture
  • Language
  • Lisp Programming Language
  • Personality
  • Printing
  • Programming Languages
  • Standards

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Approximation Theory.
  • Computer Science.
  • Geochemistry