* Larry Troxler
| If the latter, then I'm surprised that anyone would settle for this!

  well, an increasing number of people want "dumb terminal behavior" from
  Emacs in various contexts.  I'm quite certain, however, that the reason
  it is the way it is has nothing to do with user preferences, but more
  likely that scrolling was expensive on the kinds of terminals that Emacs
  was first implemented for.  sometimes, users sympathize with theses cost
  issues, but since many users don't appear to care how much a redisplay
  costs (or notice it in the first place :), this once valid assumption and
  design criterion may become less and less valid.

| Or perhaps I am not describing the problem correctly?

  I understood you.

| So, out of those 50 lines of output, I only see less than 20, and the
| bottom  20 lines are empty space!

  but this is very useful for your next 20 lines of output.  (no, really,
  I'm not being facetious.  that _is_ the argument in favor of the design.)

| I would think that the ACL/emacs Elisp code, could recognize when the ACL
| prompt is received (or by some other method, determine when the output
| from Lisp has ended), and at that time adjust the output to put the
| prompt at the bottom of the screen.

  it has a different function, actually, FI:SUBPROCESS-SHOW-OUTPUT, that
  moves the first line of output to the _top_ of the display.  since this
  is normally bound to C-c C-v, and C-v is bound to SCROLL-UP in Emacs by
  default, this makes it easy to browse the output.  incidentally, I use
  FI:SUBPROCESS-KILL-OUTPUT a lot with talkative functions.  it is normally
  bound to C-c C-k.

| I think I vaguely remember some technical reason why this can't be done,
| but now, I sure don't remember it.

  I'm sure it can be done, but I'm not sure how we can avoid the problem
  that the user may want to move elsewhere, which is frequently harder to
  solve than the trivial fixes.  a change to the redisplay internals may be
  a better solution.  I'll see if I can get something thought up and put
  into the next release of Emacs.

#:Erik