[armedbear-devel] Design issue regarding condition printing (was: Error reporting problems)

[Erik Huelsmann]

Hi Kevin,

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 11:40 PM, Kevin Reid <kpreid at switchb.org> wrote:
> On Jan 21, 2011, at 16:48, Erik Huelsmann wrote:
>
>> *print-readably* nil
>> --> all other *print-** variables bound like the values specified for
>> WITH-STANDARD-IO-SYNTAX (except maybe *PRINT-ESCAPE*)
>
>
> I don't think it's a good idea to explicitly bind *print-circle* to
> nil in anything debugging-related, including error printing, because
> then it's a source of nontermination (silent until out of memory, if
> the output is going to a string) if user code is working with circular
> structure.

That's a good point. Rather, it may even be better to explicitly bind it to T.

This remark made me realize that our Java side writeToString actually
doesn't support *PRINT-CIRCLE* which can be an issue when trying to
debug ABCL before it has loaded the ERROR and PRINT-OBJECT
infrastructures.

To make sure it's not forgotten, I've filed a ticket for that.


Thanks for your feedback!

Bye,


Erik.