[Gcl-devel] Windows ANSI test - universe.lsp

[Mike Thomas]

Hi all.

Dave and I have each had trouble in the ANSI test with universe.lsp on 
high optimisation.

By a process of elimination I found the site of the problem in the 
defparameter *characters* declaration at the error call which, when 
replaced with (print "error") (and supplemented with a print of the loop 
parameter) actually does print an error message rather than barfing:

================================================
(defun try-to-read-chars (&rest namelist)
  (loop
    for name in namelist append
        (handler-case
            (list (read-from-string
                   (concatenate 'string "\#\\" name)))
          (error () nil))))

(defparameter *characters*
    (remove-duplicates
     `(#\Newline
       #\Space
       ,@(try-to-read-chars "Rubout"
                            "Page"
                            "Tab"
                            "Backspace"
                            "Return"
                            "Linefeed"
                            "Null")
       #\a #\A #\0 #\9 #\. #\( #\) #\[ #\]
       )))
================================================

The error message:

================================================
Loading ansi-aux-macros.o
start address -T 107f2680 Finished loading ansi-aux-macros.o
Loading universe.lsp

"#\\Rubout"
"#\\Page"
"#\\Tab"
"#\\Backspace"
"#\\Return"
"#\\Linefeed"
"#\\Null"
Error in READ-FROM-STRING [or a callee]: "NULL" is an illegal character 
name.
================================================

It's 9.30 at night and I've been going since 3.30 this morning (not all 
on programming of course) so I don't propose to chase this problem now 
or tomorrow, but if someone can take the baton it would be appreciated.

There are really two problems here:

1. the Null character error message and

2. the fact that error barfs in that location (it doesn't if just typed 
on the command line).

Cheers

Mike Thomas.