(starts-with in-my-text "this")
..more important, I think, is that pseudo-code self-explanatory formulas
were included into the manual as well as in the short help one-liners.
This (verbs, nouns, verb phrase) is how brain operates naturally, and writing documentation "formally", i.e. requiring the poor sod of user to:
(a) learn the special lingo to speak ABOUT the target language
(b) read the stuff in the lingo, which speaks "about" but not to the point
(c) do the internal translation into exactly this kind of pseudo-code:
"Aha! so this is "match this in-this-(buffer)-string".
Now he "understood"! Eureka!!
This problem, or a slightly more general problem of right "entry" is the major problem in presenting any information.
It's like they gave you a task to find all telepnones in a certain area by reading an alphabetic telepnone book. Of course, the information is there, but to get the needed prefix you'd have to scan THE WHOLE of it.
These 2 defects literally kill good programming ideas. Both are present in the formal decumentation that "follows (government) standards", try to find a practical description of LISP!
The Internet Age made people without formulating it as a principle spontaneously re-write explanations in a much more practical way.
"Cookbooks", documentation and "intro" texts for the modern scripting languages are of incomparably better quality than those of the previous age (requiring to learn the birdy talk of descriptions "about" and back-translating into concrete examples).
However even now the principle is not implemented fully because people lack explicit understanding of the above.
We can with little effort make all NewLisp operator definitions self=-explanatory.
I did this for an earlier version of the manual, but it will need redoing now.
P.S. Interesting that the same realization happened in linguistics, too. A pioneering project in Birmingham University (they were one of the first to use computers to analyze actual usage pattern of English in the 1980s, by the way).
Their word definitions being definitions at the same time describe the actual collocation and usage patterns as well.