Re: Issue: DESCRIBE-INTERACTIVE (Version 1)

[David A. Moon <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: 12 Sep 88 13:52 PDT
    From: Masinter.pa@Xerox.COM

    I think having DESCRIBE in the standard is much less useful if it is too vague.
    If you want something interactive, use INSPECT.  No?

In spite of the name of his proposal, I think Kent was proposing to make
it (slightly) -less- vague.  Right now about all CLtL says is that
DESCRIBE prints "information" that is indented.  Since the output of
DESCRIBE cannot be useful to programs, I think it's better to allow it
to ask questions than to add a bunch of new mechanism, such as keyword
arguments to DESCRIBE, to control what is printed.  Of course a good
implementation would only ask questions when *STANDARD-OUTPUT* is an
interactive stream, if Common Lisp had a way to ask whether a stream is
interactive.