There is an alternative to manually establishing a conversation and then disconnecting it once all transactions between server and client are concluded: the automatically managed conversation. Client functions that end with a
*
conduct automatically managed conversations.
A function handling an automatically managed conversation takes a service designator and topic designator as two of its arguments, and either automatically establishes a conversation with a server responding to the service designator/topic designator pair, or uses an existing equivalent conversation. For the purpose of brevity, functions conducting automatically managed conversations are only briefly mentioned in this chapter. For the details see dde-advise-start*, dde-advise-stop*, dde-execute*, dde-execute-command*, dde-execute-string*, dde-item*, dde-poke* and dde-request*.
LispWorks User Guide and Reference Manual - 21 Dec 2011