XEmacs hash table representation (was XEmacs builds failing - gnus-spec.el)

[Mike Kupfer <mike.kupfer@xemacs.org>]

Mike Kupfer wrote:

> David Engster wrote:
> > Another example is the registry, which is not persistent under XEmacs
> > because it lacks a printed representation for hash tables.
> 
> Interesting; thanks.  It looks like 21.5 has a printed representation,
> but the output from #'print can't be fed back to #'read.  I'll file an
> XEmacs bug.

I looked into this some more.  It turns out that #'print et al can be
told to use a read-able representation for hash tables; it's just not
the default.  To get a read-able representation, you first have to bind
print-readably to t, as in

  (setq myhash (make-hash-table))
  (let ((print-readably t)) (prin1-to-string myhash))

I suggested making the read-able representation the default, but that
was rejected.

Does Gnus need to preserve the hash table metadata (rehash-size et al)?
I was wondering if it would work just as well for Gnus to use an alist
as the external representation for a hash table.

regards,
mike