bug#54550: Debugging elisp files

[goncholden via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

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------- Original Message -------

On Friday, March 25th, 2022 at 8:30 PM, Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com> wrote:

> > > > > > On Thu, 24 Mar 2022 18:19:13 +0000, goncholden via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org said:
>
> >> I am debugging a large file because of the following error,
>
> >> Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading ‘/home/goncho/.emacs’:
> >> Invalid read syntax: )
>
> One way to work with this is to put point at the beginning of .emacs
> and eval
>
> (while t (forward-sexp))
>
> That will error and tell you at what character position itʼs failing.

> >> In texinfo, there exists the "@ignore" and "@end ignore" tags that
> >> comment out sections of texinfo code. This makes it much easier to
> >> debug texinfo files, because one does not have to constantly comment
> >> every line, and with the advantage that one can leave the file almost
> >> intact.

> You can wrap blocks of code in (when nil) to achieve the same.
> Robert

I cannot say that the "(when nil)" can include a chunk of defuns though,
only sections within a function.