Re: proposal to make null string handling more emacs-y

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Jeremiah Dodds <jeremiah.dodds@gmail.com> writes:
>>> I believe this is because it seems that the "uh-oh i got a nil when I
>>> expected a string" error commonly happens on emacs startup, confusing
>>> new users, presumably after loading some big bunch of elisp.
>>
>> Does it?  I don't think I've _ever_ seen that error at startup (though
>> I've certainly had errors during startup)...
>
> It's happened to me enough times over the course of the decade or so
> that I've been using emacs to remember it. I know that the first few
> times it happened, I was pretty green and got really confused for a
> while. Nowadays, I know how to figure out wtf is going on.

Startup is typically a particularly intense period of elisp execution
in a short period of time, so it's not surprising if errors are more
noticeable there, and particularly annoying, because they often leave
Emacs in an uncertain state.

But:

(1) This particular type of error (nil when string expected) is just
    as, or even more, likely to occur over the rest of Emacs'
    execution.

(2) Many other types of errors (whether bugs or transient errors
    because of e.g. environmental issues or something [can't open some
    file, network down, ...]) can occur during startup

So there doesn't really seem to be all that much correlation between
what Steve was complaining about and startup.  To the extent his
complaint is valid, it's a general issue, not a "startup issue."

Moreover, if Emacs is clumsy at handling errors during startup (and I
agree that it is), that's a problem that should be addressed generally
in the startup mechanism, not by bandaids on only vaguely related
areas.

In other words, these these things look largely orthogonal.

[If this particular bandaid were harmless maybe it should be added
anyway, as a stop-gap to a more proper solution -- but it isn't
harmless, at least when applied generally; in certain cases, it may
be, of course.]

-Miles

-- 
`Life is a boundless sea of bitterness'