-(defun select (&rest select-all-args)
- "Selects data from database given the constraints specified. Returns
-a list of lists of record values as specified by select-all-args. By
-default, the records are each represented as lists of attribute
-values. The selections argument may be either db-identifiers, literal
-strings or view classes. If the argument consists solely of view
-classes, the return value will be instances of objects rather than raw
-tuples."
+(defun select (&rest select-all-args)
+ "The function SELECT selects data from DATABASE, which has a
+default value of *DEFAULT-DATABASE*, given the constraints
+specified by the rest of the ARGS. It returns a list of objects
+as specified by SELECTIONS. By default, the objects will each be
+represented as lists of attribute values. The argument SELECTIONS
+consists either of database identifiers, type-modified database
+identifiers or literal strings. A type-modifed database
+identifier is an expression such as [foo :string] which means
+that the values in column foo are returned as Lisp strings. The
+FLATP argument, which has a default value of nil, specifies if
+full bracketed results should be returned for each matched
+entry. If FLATP is nil, the results are returned as a list of
+lists. If FLATP is t, the results are returned as elements of a
+list, only if there is only one result per row. The arguments
+ALL, SET-OPERATION, DISTINCT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP-BY, HAVING and
+ORDER-by have the same function as the equivalent SQL expression.
+The SELECT function is common across both the functional and
+object-oriented SQL interfaces. If selections refers to View
+Classes then the select operation becomes object-oriented. This
+means that SELECT returns a list of View Class instances, and
+SLOT-VALUE becomes a valid SQL operator for use within the where
+clause. In the View Class case, a second equivalent select call
+will return the same View Class instance objects. If REFRESH is
+true, then existing instances are updated if necessary, and in
+this case you might need to extend the hook INSTANCE-REFRESHED.
+The default value of REFRESH is nil. SQL expressions used in the
+SELECT function are specified using the square bracket syntax,
+once this syntax has been enabled using
+ENABLE-SQL-READER-SYNTAX."
+