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The most general-purpose directive is ‘~A’, which consumes one format argument of any type and outputs it in aesthetic (human-readable) form: strings are output without quotation marks or escape characters, and numbers are output in a natural way for the type of number.
‘~S’ tries to generate output that can be read back in with READ.
Thus, strings will be enclosed in quotation marks, symbols will be
package-qualified when necessary, and so on.
With a colon modifier, both the ‘~A’ and ‘~S’ directives emit ‘NIL’ as ‘()’ rather than ‘NIL’.
Both the ‘~A’ and ‘~S’ directives also take up to four prefix parameters, which can be used to control whether padding is added after (or before with the at-sign modifier) the value, but those parameters are only really useful for generating tabular data.
emits a newline
emits a fresh line. The difference between the two is that ‘~%’ always emits a newline, while ‘~&’ emits one only if it’s not already at the beginning of a line.
Both of these directives can take a single prefix parameter that specifies the number of newlines to emit.
causes FORMAT to emit a literal tilde. Also takes a prefix parameter to determine how many to print.