Re: Uninterned symbols

[Martin Grabmueller]

> From: Marius Vollmer <address@hidden>
> Date: 18 May 2001 00:15:15 +0200
> 
> Uninterned symbols must be printed differently from interned symbols.
> Identical uninterned symbols could be identified in printed output by
> using the notation for shared structure to flag them.  Like, assuming
> gensym returns uninterned symbols, and uninterned symbols are printed
> with a "#~" prefix:
> 
>     guile> (define g (gensym))
>     guile> (define h (list g g))
>     guile> h
>     (#1=#~g0 #1#)
> 
> We would have to fix the reader and printer to get this right, I
> think.

Do you mean fixing the printer/reader so that _every_ shared structure
is printed and read an as you described above?  I suppose that'll be
quite hard...

> Reading a "#~" object would create a new uninterned symbol with the
> given name, and recreating the original structure would be achieved
> with the `#n=' and `#n#' notation.

If we only wanted that to apply to uninterned symbols, we have it
already (well, I have), so we would not need to touch the
shared-structure printing stuff at all.

Regards,
  'martin