[Texmacs-dev] A recipe to crash TeXmacs

[Marduk Bolaños]

Dear all,

While learning to write macros, I discovered that it is very
easy to crash TeXmacs if one is not careful.

Following the manual I wanted to define this macro:

<assign|hello|<macro|name|Hello
<with|font-shape|small-caps|name>!>>

But instead I entered

<assign|hello<macro|name|Hello
<with|font-shape|small-caps|name>!>|>

Then I pressed Return several times and TeXmacs crashed
(quit). The latest version does not quit but an error window
comes up and the whole line is deleted.

I verified that this bug exists since at least 2011.

I know that one is not supposed to write grammatically
incorrect macros, but one can do it.

Either it should not be possible to do it or TeXmacs should
fail more gracefully.

This bug is of great importance for TeXmacs users in Ubuntu,
given that an old version was included in recent Ubuntus.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,
Marduk