Re: keeping the arglist

[moon (David A. Moon)]

> Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 18:27:41
> From: cfry@MIT.EDU (Christopher Fry)
> > 
> >     Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1992 20:00 PST
> >     From: cfry@mit.edu (Christopher Fry)
> > 
> >     > a Fred command analogous c-Sh-A on the lispm
> >     >should be easy to implement.
> > 
> >     Yes! I've been thinking the same thing. To make the user feel confident that the
> >     machine is giving him the arglist to foo instead of bar, the minibuffer printout
> >     should include the name of the fn too.It could just print a fn call of the fn
> >     with the argnames in place of the args. Example:
> >     (foo argname1 argname2 &optional argname3)
> > 
> > This is OK for FOO, but doesn't work as well for
> > DEFINE-PRESENTATION-TO-COMMAND-TRANSLATOR (a legitimate symbol in
> > the CLIM package), unless we all get much wider screens.
> I sent off some ideas about this, but perhaps they didn't get to everybody on the
> list. One was simply have an environment variable whose value is the maximum number
> of chars of the fn name to display when you ask for the arglist.
> You could set it to 0 or 4 or 10. Even if you can't get the full name,
> you should be able to get enough of it in the context that your in
> to make you feel secure that its refering to the right fn.

That doesn't help if the function has lots of keyword arguments rather than lots
of characters in its name.

For gosh sake, this is the Macintosh, we have windows here.  This isn't 1976 vintage
Emacs on a 24x80 character display!  Why doesn't it display the information in a window
sized to fit and positioned intelligently??