Land of Lisp

Printing Multiple Lines of Output

Common Lisp has two different commands for starting a new line during printing. The first, terpri, simply tells Lisp to terminate the current line and start a new one for printing subsequent output. For example, we can print two numbers on different lines like so:

> (progn (princ 22)
         (terpri)
         (princ 33))
22
33

We can also start a new line with fresh-line. This command will start a new line, but only if the cursor position in the REPL isn’t already at the very front of a line. Let’s look at some examples:

> (progn (princ 22)
         (fresh-line)
         (princ 33))
22
33
> (progn (princ 22)
         (fresh-line)
         (fresh-line)
         (princ 33))
22
33

As you can see, placing two fresh-line statements between the two princ calls resulted in Lisp printing ...