[Ecls-list] How to produce useful error reports

[Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll]

On Wednesday 18 December 2002 16:52, Edi Weitz wrote:
> "marcoxa" <marcoxa at cs.nyu.edu> writes:
> > Very breifly.
> > The first error may be a DEFSYSTEM error.  I need a backtrace to see
> > where it could be.
>
> I suspect this won't be very helpful:
> [... Debug information from *compiled* Lisp code removed ...]

I am forwarding this to the mailing list, because this answer may be of 
interest to other people.

As a rule of thumb, before submitting reports about Lisp code that you have 
compiled, make sure that the same codes works in the interpreter. The reasons 
are

1) I have tested the interpreter far more than the compiler. For me it is 
important to first rule out problems which are specific to the compiler.

2) One may get better information by using not the compiled 
whatever-lisp-file.so library but whatever-lisp-file.lisp!!!! (See below)

It may also be useful if you can make a small package with the files which 
produce the error, so that I can do further testing (You must understand that 
I lack code to test ECL with. Right now, I work with CLOCC components, trying 
to compile and use them, but these are toy applications).

------------

Sample debugging session in the interpreter
ECL (Embeddable Common-Lisp) 0.8
Copyright (C) 1984 Taiichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya
Copyright (C) 1993 Giuseppe Attardi
Copyright (C) 2000 Juan J. Garcia-Ripoll
	ECL is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; see file 'Copyright' for details.
Type :h for Help.  Top level.
> (defun test (x) (+ x 'a))
TEST
> (test 2)
A is not of type NUMBER.
Broken at +.
>> :b
Backtrace: + > test > eval
>> :v
Local variables: none
>> :p
Broken at TEST.
>> :v
Block names: TEST.
Local variables: 
  X: 2


Juanjo