common lisp help equivalent to help in python

Question

At a python interpreter, one can simply type help("name") to visit documentation for name.

1. What is the equivalent in a common-lisp REPL (I am using SBCL)?
2. Note that I am using SLIME in emacs 24.3

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Try these:

(documentation #'cons 'function)
(documentation 'most-positive-fixnum 'variable)
(describe #'cons)

Slime also has a bunch of shortcuts for looking at things: slime-describe-symbol, slime-inspect (and if you have the hyperspec sitting around, slime-documentation-lookup) might all be useful.