doc strings

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1992 15:08 EST
    From: s9274@srl1.LANL.GOV

	    I found this interesting some years back, namely, that TI added (or left
	    in) the documentation strings for nearly all of their functions.
	    Surprisingly, nothing obvious (at that time, anyway) in TI's operating
	    system made extensive use of the documentation.
    
	Why would the OS need to make use of it?  They presumably did it for the
	*users*.

    My point, exactly, although (obviously) unclearly stated. Why go to all
    that trouble and not have any tools (other than DOCUMENTATION) to read
    the doc strings?

Are you sure that c-sh-D in Zmacs doesn't display it?  I think that
command was implemented back in the MIT CADR days, and I'd be surprised
if TI took it out.

And even if not, what's wrong with DOCUMENTATION as the only interface?
It's what people familiar with Common Lisp expect.  If they want fancier
interfaces they can always write them.  Compare this to the Symbolics
situation, where one must use undocumented interfaces to the online
manual database and try to extract the textual information from the
data.

If Symbolics's reason for not including documentation strings was to
keep the image size down, they could have implemented the DOCUMENTATION
function so that it got its information from the file system, just as
the Document Examiner does.  Or they could have implemented
DOCUMENTATION so that it looks up in the online manual and extract the
unformatted text.

                                                barmar