Access to documentation strings

[Kent M. Pitman <KMP at MIT-MC>]

The use of one-line documentation strings is not to provide complete 
documentation, it is to allow APROPOS-style primitives so that the user
can make a good guess about which functions to ask for full documentation on.

    Date: Monday, 30 August 1982  13:24-EDT
    From: Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

    We already have a long-form documentation (the manual entry) and a short
    pocket-guide sort of entry (the documentation string) for each function...

I question the importance of this point. I think it's neat that you have so
much documentation of primitive functions, but you should definitely not think
of the primitive system as the only thing that's going to use this sort of 
documentation facility. You can expect other major systems (ZWEI, for example)
or imbedded languages (FRL, BrandX, etc.), all of which will be increasing the
size of the namespace considerably. When a user is searching for a primitive
he knows is there somewhere, the short-description facility is tremendously
useful.