Empty-type vectors are written as junk strings

[James M. Lawrence]

* (write (make-array 10 :element-type nil))
"£KÇ...<other junk>"

Possibly this could be a security concern? In any case it's crude.

New version:

* (write (make-array 10 :element-type nil))
#<(SIMPLE-ARRAY NIL (10)) {C9FEC8F}>

Vectors of the empty type that are empty may be printed readably:

* (write (make-array 0 :element-type nil) :readably t)
#.(COERCE #() '(SIMPLE-ARRAY NIL (*)))

[James M. Lawrence (llmjjmll)]

On second thought, I suppose this violates the specification (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec/Body/sec_22-1-3-4.html), which says that a double-quote must be printed before and after. Therefore "" would be the representation of an empty string with characters of type nil.

Thus the fix would be to signal an error when an element of an empty-type string is accessed via the stream functionality, just as using AREF signals an error.

[Stas Boukarev (stassats)]

This was caused by errors for accessing nil-arrays falling through. Fixed in 76f4df573f6c4fe9063e2d22c8672ddf831a3d14