ECL does not support docstrings for functions created with flet, labels or lambda. Why?

[Daniel Kochmański]

Hello,

the problem origins from the fact, that documentation isn't stored in
the same structure as the function definition (we have PDE machanism and
expand-set-documentation for that). Lambda macro doesn't use them,
because it doesn't have associated global symbol (same goes for flet and
labels as well as for macrolet and such).

This is a quirk I would want to fix at some point of time. The way to go
will be adding documentation slot to the appropriate structures. Another
problem originating from the current behavior is that our documentation
is usually lost when the image is restarted (unless we dump the
documentation and load it again at start) – fas files doesn't contain
documentation entries whatsoever.

I'm adding #337 issue to the tracker so you can track a progress when I
get to it: https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl/issues/337 . I
don't know about the other implementations.

Best regards,
Daniel

Alexander Artemenko writes:

> Hi!
>
> I found that:
>
> CL-USER> (let ((foo (lambda () "With docstring" 100500)))
>>            (princ (funcall foo))
>>            (terpri)
>>            (princ (documentation foo t)))
>> 100500
>> NIL
>> NIL
>
>
> in ECL, but:
>
> CL-USER> (let ((foo (lambda () "With docstring" 100500)))
>>            (princ (funcall foo))
>>            (terpri)
>>            (princ (documentation foo t)))
>> 100500
>> With docstring
>> "With docstring"
>
>
> Why?
>
> BTW, similar behaviour have ABCL, Allegro and CCL. But SBCL and CLISP work
> as expected.


-- 
Daniel Kochmański ;; aka jackdaniel | Przemyśl, Poland
TurtleWare - Daniel Kochmański      | www.turtleware.eu

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi