CLCS

Printing Characters

When printer escaping is disabled,

a character prints as itself; it is sent directly to the output stream.

When printer escaping is enabled,

then #\ syntax is used.

When the printer types out the name of a character, it uses the same table as the #\ reader macro would use; therefore any character name that is typed out is acceptable as input (in that implementation). If a non-graphic character has a standardized name_5, that name is preferred over non-standard names for printing in #\ notation. For the graphic standard characters, the character itself is always used for printing in #\ notation—even if the character also has a name_5.

For details about the #\ reader macro, see Sharpsign Backslash.