The bigger Lisp IDEs have a different idea. They use the running image as an information system about all the sources it has seen, which means, which it has loa

The bigger Lisp IDEs have a different idea. They use the running image as an information system about all the sources it has seen, which means, which it has loaded and/or compiled. Location of source, arguments, who calls who and from where, documentation snippets, ... When you load and compile, this data is continously updated. See: http://lispm.de/genera-concepts http://lispm.de/genera-concepts LispWorks or Allegro CL are in that direction. It's not as radical as the InterLisp-D system, which is in many ways similar to Smalltalk - when in fact many ideas in Smalltalk are coming from Interlisp and its earlier BBN Lisp, including part of the runtime technology, which enables dumping/restarting images.