"OURY, JACOB DAVID" <Jacob.Oury@psu.edu> writes:

glad someone is finally looking at this, dismal was my goto spreadsheet
solution and I'd love to see it come back --- in its absence I use
org-mode and its embedded functionality which is good enough for simple
things, but dismal would complete the emacs suite.

> Hi, 
>
> My name is Jacob Oury and I'm a doctoral candidate advised by Frank
> Ritter (an original Dismal dev!) and I'm trying to get Dismal working
> on the latest version of EMACS. I've found a few issues, and I'm
> hoping you could provide some advice. I'll describe them below. 
>
> 1 I believe Dismal V1.5 is missing a key file for running dismal. Per
>   the description, the package should include a file called
>   dismal-mode-defaults.el, however this is not available in the
>   elpa.gnu package repo. I was able to work around this issue by
>   acquiring a previous version of Dismal from my advisor and manually
>   loading that file. Without that, I am unsure if I could get this
>   package running. Per the Git records at
>   http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/log/?h=externals/dismal,
>   it looks like that file was deleted in update below. I think this
>   may have broken the package and I'm hoping to find out why that file
>   was deleted.  
>
>   author Stefan Monnier 2013-06-06 16:20:37 
>    <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> -0400 
>   committer Stefan Monnier 2013-06-06 16:20:37 
>    <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> -0400 
>   commit 554819b2d3c2e3d4494845a23deffd7245349a56 (patch) 
>   tree c4b11570454318e4dba291c1732f18e8dc639a58 
>   parent 18a2365ebc31e03bce64aa45227a5e6f5e869bad (diff) 
>   download elpa-554819b2d3c2e3d4494845a23deffd7245349a56.tar.gz 
>   General cleanup for GNU ELPA
> 2 Once I got the defaults loaded, I also am running into issues during
>   testing (dis-test-dismal). It initially runs, however, the test
>   fails when trying to insert a simple math equation into a cell: 
>
>   dis-edit-cell-plain((+ 2 3))
>
>   While running the test, the process fails with the message: 
>   "dismal-set-cell-internals: Symbol’s value as variable is void:
>   index". I believe this may be due to some effect of the outdated
>   heaps.el package, however Frank's version of Dismal (Dismal V1.4
>   running on Emacs 25.X, on MacOS) runs fine. I'm using a Windows
>   computer so that could play a role. When tracing the test through
>   the debugger, it fails immediately following a call to heap-empty
>   with the info shown below. I'm still figuring out the debugger, and
>   I don't have a more thorough printout of the trace at the moment. 
>
>   Debugger entered--entering a function:
>   * command-error-default-function((void-variable index) ""
>   dismal-set-cell-internals)
>     recursive-edit()
>   ;;Debugger cleared most of its text once the void variable error
>   occurs, so the excerpts from immediately before the error are below
>   this line and the output from the debugger is above. 
>   * heap-empty([dismal-address-compare 1 0 [nil]])
>   * heap-member((3 . 0) [dismal-address-compare 1 0 [nil]])
>   * dismal-invalidate-cell((3 . 0))
>   * dismal-set-cell-internals(3 0 (+ 2 3) nil)
>   * dismal-set-cell(3 0 (+ 2 3) nil)
>   * dismal-edit-cell((+ 2 3) nil)
>
> I'm an EMACS novice (I generally work on the experimental cognitive
> psychology side of things while my labmates are more focused on using
> ACT-R for cognitive models), and so I may have made some missteps
> here, but I've been working with Frank during some debugging and still
> not having any luck so I'd appreciate any and all help you could
> provide on these issues. Thanks so much!
>
> Best regards, 
>
> Jacob D. Oury
> Doctoral Candidate in Informatics
> Applied Cognitive Science Lab
> Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology 
>

-- 

Thanks,

--Raman
♈ Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  🦮