A package riddle (Lisp)

[clausb]

Hi all,

I just posted the first of a small series of blog posts on an interesting Lisp package problem which I debugged recently. Can you guess what the sample code at http://www.clausbrod.de/Blog/DefinePrivatePublic20090819PackageRiddle does - and why?

Have fun:-)

Claus

[clausb]

And here's part 2 of the package riddle:

http://www.clausbrod.de/Blog/DefinePrivatePublic20090820PackageRiddlePart2

Enjoy 8-)

Claus

[clausb]

Part III is now also online:

http://www.clausbrod.de/Blog/DefinePrivatePublic20090822PackageRiddlePart3

I'll solve the puzzle in part IV.

Claus

[BMaverick]

To test or not to test, that is the question.

Test a deep hidden symbol and a popup menu. Well, that's what I have gotten from this. I'm not a LISP expert by any means. It will be neat to see the last installment to reveal hidden method to this.

[clausb]

Fourth and final part: http://www.clausbrod.de/Blog/DefinePrivatePublic20090828PackageRiddle4

One of the blog articles (hopefully) will cover some background on what a dialog actually is, and why you, unlike other Lisp stuff, you can call dialogs without those parentheses.

Claus

[BMaverick]

OK, now that the problem was solved with test how would one use this knowledge practically in CoCreate?

[clausb]

The test code is a stripped-down version of the original debugging scenario I encountered; it doesn't do anything useful other than to provoke a puzzling error message.

As an end user or admin, you will probably not care about the intricacies of Lisp package handling as discussed in the series. I have seen application programmers run into the issue, however, so maybe this is helpful to someone out there, some day...

And I promise to return to less geeky stuff in upcoming blog postings 8-)