19.1 Introduction to Reading and Printing

Reading a Lisp object means parsing a Lisp expression in textual form and producing a corresponding Lisp object. This is how Lisp programs get into Lisp from files of Lisp code. We call the text the read syntax of the object. For example, the text `(a . 5)' is the read syntax for a cons cell whose car is a and whose cdr is the number 5.

Printing a Lisp object means producing text that represents that object—converting the object to its printed representation (see Printed Representation). Printing the cons cell described above produces the text `(a . 5)'.

Reading and printing are more or less inverse operations: printing the object that results from reading a given piece of text often produces the same text, and reading the text that results from printing an object usually produces a similar-looking object. For example, printing the symbol foo produces the text `foo', and reading that text returns the symbol foo. Printing a list whose elements are a and b produces the text `(a b)', and reading that text produces a list (but not the same list) with elements a and b.

However, these two operations are not precisely inverse to each other. There are three kinds of exceptions:

• Printing can produce text that cannot be read. For example, buffers, windows, frames, subprocesses and markers print as text that starts with `#'; if you try to read this text, you get an error. There is no way to read those data types.
• One object can have multiple textual representations. For example, `1' and `01' represent the same integer, and `(a b)' and `(a . (b))' represent the same list. Reading will accept any of the alternatives, but printing must choose one of them.
• Comments can appear at certain points in the middle of an object's read sequence without affecting the result of reading it.