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

[hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Marty Hall)]

In message entitled "Portable way to get a function's arg list 
AND DOC STRING??" on Mar 24, Kent Pitman writes:
[...]
> No pre-defined function (not even a CLtL-defined function) is required
> to have a documentation string.  (i.e., it is definitely not a bug or
> non-conformance in Symbolics software that we don't provide them.)
[...]
> I know this seems harsh given your desire to write portable
> documentation tools, but the point is that doc strings are really an
> "environment" issue, not a "linguistic" issue. [...]

Yes, this was clear from the beginning. I don't think anyone was (well, I
wasn't, anyhow :-) interpreting the lack of Symbolics doc strings as an 
implied complaint that Symbolics was non-conforming or even less useful.

In this particular application, I am trying to write some small
developer's utilities, so environment issues are important here. Further,
when I asked my original question about getting the function's arglist,
I had no idea that there even was a semi-standard "ARGLIST" function that
so many vendors supported, and was assuming that there was nothing to be
done that was in any way portable. But this brings up another question: does
something like ARGLIST really require carrying extra baggage (as maintaining
the doc strings clearly do)? Wouldn't an implementation have to store
this somewhere in the function object anyhow, so that ARGLIST would just
involve knowing how to extract it?

				- Marty
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Artificial Intelligence Lab, AAI Corp, PO Box 126, Hunt Valley, MD 21030

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