Subject: idescribe

From: Marcus Daniels <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 1995 02:02:00 GMT

Raymond Toy has written an alternate DESCRIBE and INSPECT which works
with CLISP.  The main purpose of this interface is present Common Lisp
documentation lifted from GCL.  idescribe may prove useful to Lisp
programmers who need usage reminders, etc.  It uses the `regexp'
module.

ma2s2.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de:/pub/lisp/clisp/contrib/idescribe.tar.gz

The summary he sent me follows:

Requirements:

	1. CLISP
	2. Regex module.  (A replacement regexp in lisp is included
	   which used to work before the regexp module was added.
	   However, it would need to updated a bit to work now.
	   Besides, it was much slower than the regexp module.)

Features:
	
	1.  Does not replace describe.  Use "info-describe" instead.
	    I was reluctant to replace the clisp describe since it
	    does give some informatino that info-describe does not.

	2.  A version of "inspect" is also included.  It mostly works
	    except for structures and objects, I think.

Missing pieces:

	1.  The documentation is all for gcl.  However, most of it
	    applicable to CLISP.

	2.  No CLISP specific stuff has been included.  In particular,
	    it should be easy to add at least the impnotes.

Hope someone finds this useful.  I certainly have when I needed to see
how such-and-such standard function was defined.