bug#33403: [Geiser-users] bug#33403: Data length limit in Guile/Geiser/Scheme evaluation

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

A few more notes:

I wrote earlier:
> However, before doing this, some warnings are in order:
>
> When in noncanonical mode, the normal processing of ERASE (usually DEL
> or Ctrl-H) and KILL (usually Ctrl-U) characters are disabled,

Also the handling of Ctrl-D appears to be disabled in noncanonical mode
on my system, although this wasn't clear to me from the docs.

> At least in the case of the Guile REPL, one notable side effect of
> running in noncanonical mode is that when a list is entered at the REPL,
> the 'read' returns as soon as the final close parenthesis is entered.
> Nothing after that is read, not even the usual newline.

There's an additional wrinkle here: after 'read' returns, Guile tries to
read optional whitespace followed by a newline, but only if it's
immediately available.  See 'flush-to-newline' at the end of
module/system/repl/repl.scm in Guile.

So, unfortunately there's a race condition here, but typically if you
send the newline immediately after the final character of input, it is
likely that the newline will be consumed by the REPL reader and not by
the code that is subsequently run.

Finally, I should note that I consider this race condition suboptimal,
and will likely change how Guile behaves in the future, so please don't
rely on the behavior I have described above.  I will likely change
Guile's REPL reader to wait for the final newline in all cases.

      Mark