interpreter exit too easily

[Brian T Rice]

On Fri, 2 May 2003, Paul Dufresne wrote:

[snipped examples of embarrassing behavior of slate.lisp]
> The worst is exiting with 'bad selector name on keyword', I'd like to
> stay at the top level. I'd rather would like a default answer of yes to
> the question 'Return to the Slate top level?' since I won't use the
> debugger soon, even more since it does not looks like it is working
> here.

This is why we haven't made any official version or sub-version releases
of Slate yet. The interpreter really is much too touchy and rather dirty
in the innards in some respects. Er, well, it's also really slow. :)

Basically, we've not made any point about suiting it for interactive use
or debugging, simply because we needed it to be as simple as possible
while useful for bootstrapping the long-awaited self-hosted compiler.

So, my general recommendation is to fileIn some group of sources that you
want to test. I may put together some unit tests so that people can cut
and paste or at least have some emotional satisfaction at seeing working
code. :)

Also, if anyone feels like hacking the interpeter to be more friendly to
the interactive user, we welcome patches. ;-) The y/n question didn't even
exist for a while until I decided that getting thrown into the lisp
debugger too often was /not/ a user-friendly behavior. If I recall,
there's no built-in way to have a "default" answer to yes/no queries,
which is why it doesn't have a default. (Not because I enjoy making people
type 'y'.)

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water at tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/