When printer escaping is disabled,
only the characters of the symbol’s name are output
(but the case in which to print characters in the name is controlled by *print-case*; see Effect of Readtable Case on the Lisp Printer).
The remainder of this section applies only
when printer escaping is enabled.
When printing a symbol, the printer inserts enough single escape and/or multiple escape characters (backslashes and/or vertical-bars) so that if read were called with the same *readtable* and with *read-base* bound to the current output base, it would return the same symbol (if it is not apparently uninterned) or an uninterned symbol with the same print name (otherwise).
For example, if the value of *print-base* were 16
when printing the symbol face, it would have to be printed as
\FACE or \Face or |FACE|,
because the token face would be read as a hexadecimal
number (decimal value 64206) if the value of *read-base* were 16.
For additional restrictions concerning characters with nonstandard syntax types in the current readtable, see the variable *print-readably*
For information about how the Lisp reader parses symbols, see Symbols as Tokens and Sharpsign Colon.
nil might be printed as ()
when *print-pretty* is true and printer escaping is enabled.