Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!eliot
From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Another Lucid Question
Message-ID: <3424@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 6 Aug 88 21:57:39 GMT
References: <3384@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <6882@bcsaic.UUCP>
Reply-To: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Distribution: na
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 40

In article <6882@bcsaic.UUCP> rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) writes:
>>My next question is this: how can I access the definition of an
>>interpreted function? [...]

>Try (grindef <function>).

Just as I thought ... someone forsaw the need for this.

>was to chance upon a colleague who happened to remember it.  The manual
>only tells you about functions that retrieve the useless #<interpreted-function
>form. We have found that Lucid's documentation is most useful when you
>already know the information that you are trying to look up. ;-) 

I once spent the better part of a day trying to find the Lucid documentation
of a function that was reporting an error in connection with the foreign-
function loader (something pertaining to discsave, or whatever it's called) -- 
it was undocumented. I think this raises a couple of questions concerning
the question of standards, packages and documentation. What Steele describes
is essentially the USER package, which is what standard lisp documentation tends
to describe. It turns out that there are an inordinate number of procedures
in SYSTEM (or in lucid, LUCID) that you might like to know about, but which
remain undocumented because they're "hidden," that is, belong to some package
other than USER. Presumably this should not affect anybody's code who keeps
to the Steele set, or at least it argues for compatibility.

But if you're not necessarily concerned with compatibilty -- and I know that
this is a moot point, and some people will frown upon this -- if you just
*happen* to be writing LISP, I think it makes tremendous sense to use the
particular lisp you have available to its full extent, without bothering
to rewrite macros that actually exist in SI but which were excluded from
Steele, and hence which are never disclosed. But these examples from Lucid
are particularly annoying.

I just want to make a practical suggestion to lisp documenters: I think
it makes sense to indicate the existence of EVERYTHING available in the lisp,
in EVERY package, regardless whether or not it's felt that the user has
the right to use these things are not. And considering the volume and expense
of the Lucid doc, I can't see why this was not done. Counterarguments?

- Eliot