Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!NSFNET-RELAY.AC.UK!damerell
From: damerell@NSFNET-RELAY.AC.UK (Dr R M Damerell, RHBNC)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: difficulties with lisp
Message-ID: <8908021423.AA05853@wheaties.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 2 Aug 89 13:53:11 GMT
Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: gnu
Organization: GNUs Not Usenet
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I am trying to write a program in Emacs Lisp for indenting Pascal, etc, and
would much appreciate advice on some difficulties:

1. When I try to  load-file  and the file has syntax errors, I cannot see any
indication of where the error was detected. Is there any way to get this? (I do
appreciate that the real error may be a long way away from the detected error,
but some errors such as "invalid read syntax" are usually detected at the right
place; and at worst, you would know you need not search the file after the place
where the error was found).

2. The byte compiler is better in this respect because it seems to display the
names of successful  defvars  and  defuns . Unfortunately they appear in the
minibuffer too fast for me to read them. Please is there any way to recover
error messages from the minibuffer?

3. Trying to debug a byte-compiled program, I get byte codes that fall off the
right hand margin of the  backtrace  buffer's window. Is there a way to tell
debug to wrap them onto the next line?

4. What is the intended effect of end-of-defun when one defun is nested in 
another? The following code is accepted by  load-file  and the functions do 
what I expect. If you point at  BB  and type C-M-e  you move to DD instead 
of  CC .  C-U  -1  C-M-e  also does peculiar things.

(defun a()
  (setq z 1)
;;; AA  
(defun b ( y)
  (setq w (+ y z) ))
;;; BB 
  (b 3)
  w)
;;; CC
(defun c ()
  17)
;;; DD


5. Regular expressions. The Emacs Manual (sec 13.5) gives an example and I think
it does not explain it properly. Please could the following text be added at
the end of the section:


Note that this is how the regexp must be spelt when you are entering it to an
Emacs Lisp program. To enter the same regexp to an interactive command such as
@code{re-search-forward} you must spell it differently:

@example
[.?!][]"')]*\($\|^Q^I\| \)[ ^Q^I^Q^J]*
@end example


R.M.Damerell