LispWorks provides two inspectors. One is for use with the LispWorks IDE, and is described in the LispWorks IDE User Guide . The other is the REPL inspector, which uses a stream interface, and can be used on any terminal (in particular within the LispWorks IDE Listener tool). Both inspectors allow you to traverse complex data structures interactively and to destructively modify components of these structures. However, the two inspectors are quite different. No attempt has been made to make their usage compatible and instead each inspector is designed to exploit to the full the particular environment facilities available.
The REPL inspector provides a simple inspector facility which can be used on a stream providing line breaks as the only type of formatting. It is built on top of the describe function which is briefly described below and modifies the top level loop in a similar way to the debugger (see The Debugger).