Re: The poor quality of Emacs's backtraces

[Mattias Engdegård]

13 juli 2023 kl. 15.35 skrev Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>:

>    (wrong-type-argument listp
>                         #[257 "\300\211\2!\262\1\207" [yes-or-no-p] 4
>                               "\n\n(fn ARG124 &optional)" t])

> So, this says that _something_ wasn't a list, without telling me what the
> something was.

Actually it does. It's the element after the type, in this case the 
byte-compiled function #[257 ...].

> It says "wrong-type-argument", but doesn't say why it's wrong.  It
> doesn't disclose which primitive detected the fault, though Emacs could
> easily do this.

Usually it's the topmost function in the traceback.
If not, please report it as a bug. There's certainly work to be done.

> test suite truncating every line at ~70 characters.  (Why is this done?)

I agree, that's annoying. We have to truncate at some point or we'll be treated 
to dumps of impractical size before we know it, but 70 chars is pretty useless.

> (The symbols in braces are an enhancement I'm currently working on to give
> more information for anonymous functions.)

Keep us in touch, because it's very likely that some of us are working on the 
same code, with similar but different goals. Don't go it alone.

> It's worth pointing out that there doesn't seem to be a way to get Emacs
> to disassemble a function, only a symbol with a function value.

Actually there is. Just use the function `disassemble`:

(disassemble #[257 "\300\211\2!\262\1\207" [yes-or-no-p] 4 "\n\n(fn ARG124 
&optional)" t])