Re: Error report on startup

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 3/1/07, Herbert Euler <address@hidden> wrote:

> Error report on startup could be confusing.  Consider the following in
> ~/.emacs:
>
>     (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect "some-file.el")
>       (read (current-buffer)))
>
> If ``some-file'' does not contain valid Lisp expression, the user will
> see an error saying ``End of file during parsing:
> /home/somebody/.emacs''.  However, the ~/.emacs file is valid; what is
> not valid is the file some-file.el.

I don't see anything confusing. You're manually loading some-file.el
and reading its content in the context of loading .emacs, so certainly
it is ~/.emacs which is not valid (or, which is doing something
invalid). That the error comes from processing an elisp module is
irrelevant. It's not different to loading a non-lispy data file in
.emacs and then doing some kind of processing with it that causes an
error.

If instead you used `load' or `require' to load some-file.el you'd get:

 An error has occurred while loading `c:/home/.emacs':

 End of file during parsing: c:/emacs/site-lisp/some-file.el

 To ensure normal operation, you should investigate and remove the
 cause of the error in your initialization file.  Start Emacs with
 the `--debug-init' option to view a complete error backtrace.

            Juanma