Indented Strings

[David A. Moon <Moon at SCRC-TENEX at MIT-MC>]

    Date: Tuesday, 21 September 1982  12:31-EDT
    From: Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

    For many uses of the auto-fill function, readtime/compile-time is the
    wrong time to do the filling.  What if we just create this new function,
    and then state that all documentation strings are run through
    STRING-FILL (or whatever) either when they are stashed away or when
    printed by DESCRIBE.
I like this a lot better.  How do you break paragraphs (preventing auto-filling
between them), when white space at the beginning of a line is discarded.
Presumably a blank line.  I agree that it should be kept simple and make no
claims of being a text justifier, just a "kludge" to make documentation and
error messages come out readably.  We should resist mightily the temptation to
put in a special character that turns off the flushing of white space at the
beginning of a line.

In systems with windows the filling has to be done at the time that it is
printed.  This is also true of systems where the font can be changed and
systems that support more than one width of terminal.  I think this covers all
proposed Common Lisp implementations.  Thus the function is not a string
operation, but a stream operation.  In fact a string operation might be useful
sometimes too, although this might be better handled by making
WITH-OUTPUT-TO-STRING accept keyword options to tell it what line-length to
assume, and then using the stream operation.