Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!H.GP.CS.CMU.EDU!cef
From: cef@H.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (Charles Fineman)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: functionp
Message-ID: <587@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: 5 Jan 88 16:56:43 GMT
References: <39315@ti-csl.CSNET>
Sender: netnews@PT.CS.CMU.EDU
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 33
Keywords: function,emacs

There are two functions you may be interested in:

	fboundp		&	symbol-function

The former tells you (given an sexpr), wether the evaluation of 
the argument has a functional value. If it does, the later will
return it to you. Note: if the symbol has no functional value,
symbol-function will signal an error (you could catch it with 
an unwind-protect (or some such beast) but that's another 
issue.

	<Slight course alteration>

Some of these functions are rather obscure (e.g. fboundp, mkunbound). 
The way I found out about them was by writting a simple c program (I have
since lost it :-( ) that went through a specified group of .c and .el
files pulling out all the symbol and function definitions and building
a SCRIBE file from the data. I grouped the functions into chapters 
according the file they were in. SCRIBE automagically built me
a table of contents. It has been *INVALUABLE* to me as a reference
manual.

I may have a few spare hours this week, perhaps I will hack up 
another program to do this and post it. I'm learning TEX now 
so the output will undoubtedly (sp?) in TEXan. It certainly won't
be the reference manual the GNU people are working on, but I think
that many of you serious/novice ELISP hackers will find as useful as
I do.


		Charles Fineman
		Carnegie-Mellon University
		cef@h.cs.cmu.edu (via seismo)