Re: pp-to-string heisenberg bug

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Thien-Thi Nguyen writes:
 > () Mike Mattie <codermattie@gmail.com>
 > () Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:56:30 -0700
 > 
 >    pp-to-string is suppost to pretty print nested lists, however
 >    when I start Emacs I always get this output truncated with ...
 > 
 > Substitution w/ "..." is called "abbreviation", not "truncation",

That's unfortunate, because the technical term is "elision", and the
semantics of elision is IMO much closer to truncation than to
abbreviation.  An abbreviation is an incomplete copy conveying the
full meaning of the original, while an elision is an incomplete copy
lacking details considered unimportant by the editor.

Thus, 'foo is an abbreviation of (quote foo) because the semantics are
exactly the same by convention (enforced by reader macro), while (foo
...) is an elision of (foo bar baz quux) because it doesn't have the
same semantics.