Re: Emacs internals + lisp guru question

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@glug.org>]

gnuist006@hotmail.com (gnuist006) writes:

> There are some functions that take a list as argument.
> Text can be read from the buffer as a string.
> There are some functions that take a "symbol" as an argument.
> A string can be converted to a symbol.

this is like poetry!

> However, when symbol is provided to the function by converting a string
>  it is not working.

move point after the close-paren for each of these forms and do C-x C-e:

(describe-function 'make-symbol)
(describe-function 'intern)
(describe-function (intern "describe-function"))

> What is the meaning of the gibberish from
> (insert (format "%s" (symbol-function 'describe-function) ))

the only gibberish i see is the white space here...........^
(which might be significant according to some demented read-table
mungers).  which gibberish are you referring to, specifically?

> What is out there to learn more about emacs/emacs_lisp and become more
> sophisticated?

grep the net for "elisp manual".  if that's too heavy, try ttn's elisp
tutorial (still incomplete but maybe you can help):

  http://www.glug.org/people/ttn/software/elisp-tutorial/

but be careful of trying to be too sophisticated:

  http://www.glug.org/people/random/flame.txt

[newsgroups trimmed.]

thi