You do not say how you eval'ed the TWO expressions.
If you are in the scratch buffer and place the cursor at the end of the 2nd line, and hit C-j, emacs is only going to eval that line, which is the last sexp before the cursor.
Try putting your cursor at the end of this, and hit C-j:
(progn
(setq file-name "test")
(describe-variable 'file-name))
Or eval each line one after the other.
From: filebat Mark <filebat.mark@gmail.com>
To: Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>
Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 12:47:44 PM
Subject: Re: what's the mystery of file-name variable?
Hi Adams
Thanks a lot for your quick
response.
After clean start with emacs -Q, the problem remain.
Below is my emacs-version:
Emacs 23.3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.20.1) of 2011-04-06 on wei-laptop
On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 12:44 AM, Drew Adams
<drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
> (setq file-name "test")
> (describe-variable 'file-name)
> file-name's value is nil
>
> Documentation:
> Not documented as a variable."
It works for me. Says file-name's value is "test" (and not documented etc.).
Give a recipe starting from emacs -Q.
--
Thanks & Regards
Denny Zhang