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I believe I finally figured out what "affects printing but not evaluation" means

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg73711] I believe I finally figured out what "affects printing but not evaluation" means
• From: "Chris Chiasson" <chris at chiasson.name>
• Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 06:10:31 -0500 (EST)

I never knew this until today, but functions like FullForm, InputForm,
CForm, NumberForm (basically, *Form) are stripped when recalling
output via %.

More specifically, they are stripped before storage into Out. That is
probably why the cell tag (or whatever it's called) looks like

Out[outputNumber]//someForm

where I have used outputNumber to stand for a number and someForm to
stand for one of the *Form expressions.

Honestly, I believe that directly saying this in the documentation
would be much better than, "affects printing but not evaluation." It
would certainly explain the problem with wrappers on the rhs of Set
and SetDelayed definitions that we all love to complain about.

-- 
http://chris.chiasson.name/