[climacs-devel] Re: [Gardeners] RFG climacs docstrings

[John Q Splittist]

Robert Strandh wrote:
> John Q Splittist writes:
>  > 
>  > My simple plan for enabling this (in the short term) would be something 
>  > like this:
[etc.]
>  > Thoughts, anyone?
>  
> This looks like a reasonable way to start.  Though, I am a bit
> confused; why is it not possibly to rely on (documentation f
> 'function) to avoid having our own hash table?

Well, initially it was because I hadn't bothered to look at definition 
of define-command to see what would happen to a docstring in the obvious 
position (sure enough, it gets passed through to DEFUN as I should have 
suspected). But:

(a) "An implementation is permitted to discard documentation strings at 
any time for implementation-defined reasons." and

(b) Having our own mechanism allows us to do what Brian suggested, and 
have a function that knows how to render the information onto a given 
pane/stream (we might what to throw an &allow-other-keys in there 
somewhere, too).

But I could be persuaded otherwise, of course.

(DEF-COMMAND was a similarly lazy coining; but since we'll need 
something that will work with other structures like special variables, 
syntaxes, views (?) etc. a naming scheme that doesn't grate too much for 
the others would be handy.)

BTW, I'm assuming it makes sense to have the documentation 
string/function as part of the command definition. (I'm not sure how 
this works with internationalized (ie. multilingual) help.) Let me know 
if I'm assuming incorrectly.

JQS