Re: Compilation warnings of ELisp seem wrong and misleading

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

"Ludwig, Mark" <ludwig.mark@siemens.com> writes:

> Greetings,
>
> I've been using an ancient Emacs (19.29) on Solaris and finally
> got around to installing a current one (24.4).
>
> I don't normally compile my ".emacs" code, but stumbled
> across a change in the compile code (compile-internal is no
> longer present), and that prompted me to explicitly
> byte-compile my custom Elisp code to see what other problems
> that would expose, so I could take care of all of them at
> the same time.
>
> I find my custom Elisp generates warnings that seem pretty stupid.
> For example:
>
> emacs.el:255:10:Warning: reference to free variable `if'
> emacs.el:219:8:Warning: reference to free variable `save-excursion'
> emacs.el:331:41:Warning: reference to free variable `forward-char'
> emacs.el:261:17:Warning: reference to free variable `insert'
> emacs.el:261:17:Warning: reference to free variable `forward-sexp'
>
> Those are all valid functions.  For example, here are lines 255-258:
>
> 	(if (not (= ans ?q))
> 	    (progn
> 	      (goto-char found-start)
> 	      (delete-region found-start found-end)))
>
> This is inside a large-ish "let*" form (111 lines).
>
> Most of this code is duplicated on Windows, where I'm using
> Emacs 24.2 (just to give some context that my Elisp
> knowledge isn't all completely ancient).
>
> I can't see how these warnings can be correct, but there are
> so many that they obscure the "meaningful" ones.  Are these
> sorts of warnings known flaws in the byte compiler, do I
> need to compile differently, am I doing something stupid, or
> what?

We cannot see either, because the meaning of a sexp is determined by its
surrounding form, which you didn't provide.

You probably have a parenthesis problem in your let* form which makes
lisp interpret some parts as being variable names instead of operators.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk