[slime-devel] On the numbering of restarts in SLDB

[Gary King]

Although it makes perfect sense, I find it irritating that the number  
for the [abort-request] restart in SLDB depends on how many other  
restarts are active. For clarity's sake, here is a list of restarts:

> Restarts:
>   0: [RETRY] Retry performing #<LOAD-OP NIL #x84F81F6> on #<SYSTEM  
> "cl-containers" #x84E8EE6>.
>   1: [ACCEPT] Continue, treating #<LOAD-OP NIL #x84F81F6> on  
> #<SYSTEM "cl-containers" #x84E8EE6> as having been successful.
>   2: [ABORT-REQUEST] Abort handling SLIME request.
>   3: [ABORT-BREAK] Reset this process
>   4: [ABORT] Kill this process

In this case, I should type '2' to give up on this request and try  
something else. In other cases, however, I might need to type '7' or  
'5' or whatever. This means that I have to look and see what to type  
every single time I hit an error (and, hey, I hit a lot of errors in  
my code!). It also scares me that I could misread and type the key  
for [abort-break] or [abort] by accident. Here is my suggestion as to  
what the list of restarts might look like:

> Restarts:
>   4: [RETRY] Retry performing #<LOAD-OP NIL #x84F81F6> on #<SYSTEM  
> "cl-containers" #x84E8EE6>.
>   3: [ACCEPT] Continue, treating #<LOAD-OP NIL #x84F81F6> on  
> #<SYSTEM "cl-containers" #x84E8EE6> as having been successful.
>   2: [ABORT-REQUEST] Abort handling SLIME request.
>   1: [ABORT-BREAK] Reset this process
>   0: [ABORT] Kill this process

or

> Restarts:
>   0: [RETRY] Retry performing #<LOAD-OP NIL #x84F81F6> on #<SYSTEM  
> "cl-containers" #x84E8EE6>.
>   1: [ACCEPT] Continue, treating #<LOAD-OP NIL #x84F81F6> on  
> #<SYSTEM "cl-containers" #x84E8EE6> as having been successful.
>   A: [ABORT-REQUEST] Abort handling SLIME request.
>   R: [ABORT-BREAK] Reset this process
>   K: [ABORT] Kill this process

In both cases, the three 'always there' restarts will always have the  
same keyboard binding. In the later example, they are non-numeric.

I'm willing to figure out how to implement this _if_ the general  
opinion is that this is a good idea. What is the general opinion?

thanks,
-- 
Gary Warren King
metabang.com
http://www.metabang.com/
(413) 210 7511
gwking on #lisp (occasionally)