* Alan Ruttenberg [2005-09-17 06:48+0200] writes:
Is there a reason why the protocol should handle inserting the result of a repl evaluation with dedicated code vs just letting the lisp side print it?
I'd say nothing very important:
1. people who don't enable presentations get different faces for the result
2. one can have a sort-of REPL without having to implement stream redirection. (Only of interest for new backends.)
I ask because now that there are nested presentations, there are advantages to having the lisp side do the printing. In particular a list result which has presented objects in could have the elements of the list work as individual presentations in addition to the whole list being available for re-use, whereas in the current situation you can only get hold of the complete result.
Instead of relying on the printer, we could perhaps return some data structure like we do for the inspector. And possibly generalize the presentation code so that it can create those structures.
Helmut.