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From: mfuller@prandtl.nas.nasa.gov (Mike J. Fuller)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: Bug in apropos
Summary: M-x apropos nil causes weird problems
Message-ID: <3947@amelia.nas.nasa.gov>
Date: 25 Nov 89 22:47:28 GMT
Sender: news@amelia.nas.nasa.gov
Reply-To: mikef@sarah.lerc.nasa.gov (Mike J. Fuller)
Distribution: gnu
Organization: NASA Lewis Research Center
Lines: 24

The other day I wanted to find out all functions and variables that
had to do specifically with "nil" (why I don't remember; had it
worked, the result probably would have been real big).  So I did a
"M-x apropos" and responded with "nil".  The result was garbage.  I
deleted the buffer and tried again, and emacs died from a segmentation
violation.  I didn't save the core file (it was around 9M).  I
repeated this feat several times with varying degrees of difficulty
(ie., some times it took many tries before emacs dumped core).  This
was with GNUemacs version 18.55 on a Sun4 running SunOS 4.0.3.  I
figured I'd try to reproduce it on another machine, so I tried with
GNUemacs version 18.55 on an Amdahl running UTS580-1.2.4, and couldn't
get it to dump core, but I did get it real confused.  Once I got the
message:
Wrong type argument: natnump, #<EMACS BUG: ILLEGAL DATATYPE (#o 44) Save your b

Anyway, I can live without knowing all the functions and variables
having to do with "nil", but this is nonetheless a bug (and from the
looks of it, a rather low level bug).

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| Mike J. Fuller |Internet: mikef@sarah.lerc.nasa.gov     |You'd be paranoid, |
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