presentation flavors

["Kevin G. Joback" <Kevin%fungus.mit.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Wed, 22 Feb 89 10:40 CST
    From: vaughan@MCC.COM (Paul Vaughan)


	    The main trouble I have with the documentation is determining
    how things were meant to be used.  They generally do a good job of
    explaining what things do, it's just what do you do with them that's
    hard.  I suppose that's the price of flexibility.  The other trouble I
    have with the documentation is the things that aren't documented.  When
    I find out about something useful that isn't documented, I never know if
    there is some good reason that it's not documented.  Usually a few
    experiments suffice to find out what it does.

This is the main problem I also have with the documentation. I am in
a group applying AI techniques to solve chemical engineering
problems.  We are positively thrilled by Symbolics's system especially
dynamic windows and presentations. However, we often discuss whether or
not we are using these facilities correctly.

Having more documentation on the ``themes'' of using presentations
(writing parsers, graphic outputs), dynamic windows (moving objects),
etc. would be nice.   The 7.2 documentation is much better than the 7.1
in this aspect.  Some complex examples would also be nice.  Till now the
complex example we have been using is the system code and it is not
extensively documented.

Many computer scientists might think this thematic type of documentation
is not needed, but I have a feeling that the large number of
non-computer scientists who use Symbolics would find it useful.