bug#13889: lenient loading, feature request

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> writes:

>> It might be a better idea to have a command that would continue
>> loading from where it stopped.  This would allow the user to fix
>> manually whatever was broken, and then continue from there.
>
> Probably both is useful.
> Someone might face a deadline the very day.
> Emacs must work. No time to fix errors just now...
> Error must not be as simple as a missing parenthesis.
> Also imagine colleagues around, awaiting the result, wondering what
> the guy is doing ;)

Popping up the .emacs file with point where the error is would be more
helpful than the current:

---
Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading ‘/home/larsi/.emacs’:

Invalid read syntax: ), 1, 0
---

I'm not sure how a general "continue loading" switch would work.  It's
easy enough if there's a command that's erroring out -- we could ignore
the error and continue loading.  But if it's a read-level error, then we
don't really know where to continue loading from.

I guess we could advance point by one character and try again in a loop
-- that'd usually get us past the error points after a while...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no