[slime-devel] newbie REPL questions

[funkyj at gmail.com]

I'm not sure how the whole SLIME development cycle is suppose to
work.  One of the things that is confusing me is that selecting
various options in SLDB causes the REPL to lose its connection with
the inferior lisp, requiring me to do 'M-x slime' to reconnect.  Here
is an example:

    ;; starting slime for the first time in this emacs session

    M-x slime
    ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
    ;; messages
    Connecting to Swank on port 2369..
    Process bridge is installed
    Connected. Hack and be merry!

    ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
    ;; repl buffer shows

    ; SLIME 2006-01-20
    CL-USER> x

    ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
    ;; sldb clisp/0 buffer appears


    EVAL: variable X has no value
       [Condition of type SYSTEM::SIMPLE-UNBOUND-VARIABLE]

    Restarts:
      0: [USE-VALUE] You may input a value to be used instead of X.
      1: [STORE-VALUE] You may input a new value for X.
      2: [ABORT-REQUEST] Abort handling SLIME request.
      3: [ABORT] ABORT

    Backtrace:
      0: #<SYSTEM-FUNCTION EVAL>
      1: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::EVAL-REGION>
      2: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::LISTENER-EVAL-1>
      3: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION #:|273 275 (DEFINTERFACE CALL-WITH-SYNTAX-HOOKS (FN) ...)-31-3-1-1|>
      4: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::CALL-WITH-BUFFER-SYNTAX>
      5: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK:LISTENER-EVAL>
      6: #<SYSTEM-FUNCTION EVAL>
      7: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::EVAL-FOR-EMACS-1>
      8: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION #:|472 477 (DEFINTERFACE CALL-WITH-DEBUGGER-HOOK (HOOK FUN) ...)-52-3-1-1|>
      9: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::EVAL-FOR-EMACS>
     10: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::READ-FROM-EMACS>
     11: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::HANDLE-REQUEST-1>
     12: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION #:|472 477 (DEFINTERFACE CALL-WITH-DEBUGGER-HOOK (HOOK FUN) ...)-52-3-1-1|>
     13: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::CALL-WITH-CONNECTION-1>
     14: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::CALL-WITH-REDIRECTED-IO>
     15: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::MAYBE-CALL-WITH-IO-REDIRECTION>
     16: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::CALL-WITH-CONNECTION>
     17: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::HANDLE-REQUEST>
     18: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::SIMPLE-SERVE-REQUESTS-2>
     19: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::SIMPLE-SERVE-REQUESTS>
     20: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::SERVE-REQUESTS>
     21: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::SERVE-CONNECTION>
     22: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::SETUP-SERVER-SERVE>
     23: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK::SETUP-SERVER>
     24: #<COMPILED-FUNCTION SWANK:START-SERVER>
     25: #<SYSTEM-FUNCTION SYSTEM::READ-EVAL-PRINT> 2


    ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
    ;; type '3' (abort) into the sldb buffer
    ;; the following minibuffer message appears:

    Lisp connection closed unexpectedly: exited abnormally with code 256

    ;; type 'enter' in repl buf and I see:

    if: Not connected. Use `M-x slime' to start a Lisp.

    ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
    ;; Starting slime again with M-x slime works fine but takes a long
    ;; time.


It seems a lot of actions cause the lisp connection to close
unexpectedly.  Is this normal?  Should I just ignore it and restart
slime?

Restarting slime after each "mistake" (I make a lot of them) is rather
tedious.

FYI: I'm using clisp from cygwin:

    GNU CLISP 2.35 (2005-08-29) (built on winsteingoldlap.ad.alphatech.com [10.41.52.182])
    Software: GNU C 3.4.4 (cygming special) (gdc 0.12, using dmd 0.125) 
    gcc -W -Wswitch -Wcomment -Wpointer-arith -Wimplicit -Wreturn-type -Wmissing-declarations -Wno-sign-compare -O2 -fexpensive-optimizations -DUNICODE -DDYNAMIC_FFI -I. -x none -lintl libcharset.a libavcall.a libcallback.a -lreadline -lncurses  -liconv -L/usr/local/libsigsegv-cygwin/lib -lsigsegv -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11
    SAFETY=0 HEAPCODES STANDARD_HEAPCODES SPVW_PAGES SPVW_MIXED
    libsigsegv 2.2
    libiconv 1.9
    Features: 
    (REGEXP SYSCALLS I18N LOOP COMPILER CLOS MOP CLISP ANSI-CL COMMON-LISP LISP=CL
     INTERPRETER SOCKETS GENERIC-STREAMS LOGICAL-PATHNAMES SCREEN FFI GETTEXT
     UNICODE BASE-CHAR=CHARACTER PC386 UNIX CYGWIN)
    C Modules: (clisp i18n syscalls regexp)
    Installation directory: /usr/lib/clisp/
    User language: ENGLISH
    Machine: I686 (I686) jcano-lt.jnpr.net [192.168.1.103]

and

    GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2004-03-10 on NYAUMO

SLIME, as you can see is the CVS head I checked out 2006-01-20.

Thanks in advance,
  --jfc