Portable way to get a function's arg list AND DOC STRING??

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1992 02:51 EST
    From: eyvind.ness%hrp.no@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM (Eyvind Ness)

    - How can you extract the documentation string from CL functions defined
    in Genera? What I want is a programmatic interface to the CP command
    "Show Documentation". CLtL2 specifies DOCUMENTATION as a good candidate
    function, and this works fine with our TI Explorer, but Genera uses the
    document examiner for that. Moreover, in my version of Genera (8.0)
    there is no sources available for SAGE::COM-SHOW-DOCUMENTATION or
    SAGE::LOOKUP-MANUAL-INTERNAL.

The DOCUMENTATION function works fine on Symbolics systems, except that
most of the Symbolics-provided functions and variables don't have
documentation strings.

The Document Examiner and Show Documentation command are completely
separate.  Unfortunately, there isn't any nice interface to the online
documentation database.  I don't think it's a simple text database; it
contains structured, formatted documentation, including Lisp code to
draw diagrams.  The Show Documentation command doesn't can't even
redirect its output to a stream that doesn't support fonts; the only way
I've ever managed to turn its output into ASCII is to display it to a
window, then copy the history to an editor buffer and clear all the font
information out.

                                                barmar