[Openmcl-devel] How is 'inspect' supposed to behave?

[Steven Núñez]

Greetings all,

I was playing around with XMLisp and noticed some odd behavior in the 'inspect' function, which the author uses in some of the examples. According the the function documentation, found here:

http://trac.clozure.com/ccl/wiki/CommandLineInspect

"To inspect a Lisp object, call the function INSPECT on the object. This displays the object, showing its contents as a sequence of numbered "items". If there are a lot of items (e.g. a large array) , they're displayed in "pages", i.e. groups that you can scroll up and down through. (Each "page" is 20 lines.)"

However most of the time 'inspect' returns nil. For example:

CL-USER> (inspect "foo")
NIL

However…

(describe "foo")
"foo"
Type: (SIMPLE-BASE-STRING 3)
Class: #<BUILT-IN-CLASS SIMPLE-BASE-STRING>
Length: 3
0: #\f
1: #\o
2: #\o
; No value

Does anyone know why, or have a good example of 'inspect'? I'm using slime and ccl 1.8.

Regards,
- Steve
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