Erik Naggum (····@naggum.no) wrote:
: * Carl L. Gay
: | You could try setting max-lisp-eval-depth higher.
: * ········@Bayou.UH.EDU
: | I did that (to enable some appreciable amount of recursion). I believe
: | the maximum is around 600, which while not bad isn't enough to make me
: | use it in scenarios where I don't know how many recursions I'll get into
: | (it would be nice if Emacs also did some tail recursion optimization).
: I'm getting a bit annoyed by these continued references to deficiencies in
: Emacs that are really just deficiencies in your ability or willingness to
: read the Emacs Lisp manual.
Or deficiencies in the way the manual is written. Oh but to suggest
this would mean that you'd lose your chance to bash me and I wouldn't
dream of doing that to you.
BTW, before you go on with your rant, I'd just like you to know that
not only do I not have anything against Emacs, but it is my favorite
program of *ANY TYPE*. I had a reputation of being an Emacs junkie
simply because I would stop people I recognized in the halls, convinced
that they should know the joy of Emacs whether or not they liked it,
so kindly refrain from your implications.
Now on to the rest of your post.
: I have already answered the implied question
: "can I make Emacs more friendly towards recursion, and if so how" in your
: incessant and incorrect complaints that "Emacs doesn't allow recursion"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Either your memory is fuzzy or your reading skills are lacking and I
frankly don't care which one it is, I never said "Emacs doesn't allow
recursion", (I'm letting you get away with the previous quote simply
because it's an accurate summary). Either get my quotes right or
save the bandwidth.
: with references to `max-lisp-eval-depth' and `max-specpdl-size', but lots
: of people out there will still believe your misguided complaints. _please_
: be more willing to ask for help and less willing to complain.
I asked a question, and when it seemed I was wrong I made sure to
make statements like "I was under the impression...". I did not
complain and I even emphasized at the end of my posts that I still
adored Emacs and even if my questions made it seem otherwise, it
was one helluva tool. I even referred to it as a "goldmine".
Why don't you stop shooting off your mouth and actually spend time
*READING* an entire post before you spout drivel here. My posts
are in this thread, read them thoroughly and you'll see that --
well let's not mince words -- that you are full of shit my dear
Erik.
: you "believe" there is a small maximum. I _know_ there isn't.
Exactly. I stated that I was under the impression that certain
things held.
: you hit the
: 600 limit because that's what `max-specpdl-size' is set to and you probably
: had one let-binding in your recursive function.
I knew about the max-specdpl-size setting but the let-binding is new
to me. I did not see any mention of it in the info that I read in
Emacs and therefore did not know how it applied.
: increase the value of this
: variable to some obscenely large value and watch Emacs hit some hard limit
: and die, instead.
Yes I was fortunate enough to witness this first hand. I set the
value of max-specdpl-size as per your last post (unlike you I
actually read a post before rambling) to a substantial number.
I believe it was 100,000. I was definitely more capable of
deeper recursion levels then but due to some sequence of events
(long nasty story about debugging and setting the values frequent
times) my system died an agonizing death. This was on a SparcStation 2
running Solaris with Emacs 18.X in it running under X-Windows.
Not that I'm holding Emacs to blame (heaven knows you've got enough
BS to throw already without my providing anymore), it was probably
due to some funny stuff I did, but the recursion level did
improve noticeably, enough so that I am now going to utilize
functional programming techniques under Elisp.
: again, it is more friendly of Emacs to complain than to
: crash, and it crashes because being able to respond when you're out of
: stack space may not be very expensive, but handling the situation cleanly
: usually is.
Yes I know, but why doesn't it eliminate tail recursion rather than
forcing any kind of nesting limit?
: to illustrate this point: watch what various Lisps do when
: they exhaust their memory -- clean recovery is not usually an option.
: Emacs has taken great pains to survive a "memory outage" when the user
: creates too many or too large buffers, by allocating a "memory reserve"
: that it uses when it suggests that you save all buffers and kill and
: restart Emacs. something similar is not undoable with stack space, but is
: much harder to make work right. unlimited recursion depth also allocates
: system stack space that is not typically returned to the operating system
: when the stack unwinds. this is a frequent cause of the very large Lisp
: images that people complain about.
I am well aware that Emacs is quite robust and what it does it does
for a good reason -- I never stated otherwise. I merely had some
questions that you seem to have taken offense at (and you'll probably
take further offense at this post).
Have a nice day Erik and I certainly hope you manage to dislodge
from your posterior whatever it is that is making you so belligerent.
: #\Erik
: --
: my other car is a cdr
--
Cya,
Ahmed
I had an operation, a statement of our times
They tied my balls together, what's inside is not alive
"Operation" by the Circle Jerks
* ········@Bayou.UH.EDU
| Have a nice day Erik and I certainly hope you manage to dislodge
| from your posterior whatever it is that is making you so belligerent.
whatever your feelings may have been at that final point of your article,
your escalating hostilites are uncalled-for. I found your article
predominantly destructive and I have no use for your destructivism. your
repeated complaints about the limitations of recursion in Emacs does not
mesh with someone who reads manuals, which I infer from your hostile
ranting that I have insulted you gravely by implying. I _would_ have had a
use for suggestions to improve the manual if you found it so lacking, but
you don't even give any reason for that. there's nothing I can do to help
your situation. I honestly thought you needed to know about those
variables since you sounded to frustrated, but you also sound a lot more
frustrated than somebody who wants to have a problem solved would do, and
so I tried to explain just why they are set so low as to limit your
experiments with recursion to the point where you feel the need to post
your negative experiences, beliefs, assumptions, whatever, but not nearly
enough to read the manual to find better ways experiment with recursion.
if you actually have something constructive to suggest for GNU Emacs 19.35,
code or manuals, let me know. I'll make sure it makes it into the release
if it is sound advice, i.e., quite unlike the above quoted sentence. it's
your call, since you have the problems. I couldn't care less what you run
into if you don't read the manual, but I do care that users out there might
actually believe there are limitations that can't be relaxed. OK?
#\Erik
--
my other car is a cdr