Re: Question from an irritated beginner

[Ken Tilton <missg@inch.com>]

Manfred,

I am an MCL beginner myself so i do not have much to offer, but I *do*
want to say, don't let this "irritation" turn you off MCL. It is an
unbelievable joy to program in this environment.

Anyway...

> Error: There is no package named "NIL" .
> While executing: #<error printing #<Recursive printing error> #xABA34A>

Purely FWIW, we've done some sick <g> things in our intense first two
months with MCL, but we have not run into anything like this. It seems
like some "Print-object" method (more below) called in the event of some
error is triggering exactly that error! Hence your stack-limited infinite
recursion.

Have you loaded something weird you found in a user contrib folder? Have
you done something interesting with the Tools/Print Options... settings?
(I had bad luck when I checked, I think,
*print-readably*)

Anyway, the people who actually know something will pile on soon enough,
but I just wanted to offer what i could to a fellow MCL newbie.

BTW, "print-object" is an awesome feature of CL: it let's you view
comrephensibly your  own (or any!) object when you run into them in
debugger/inspector output. I *have* put bugs in my own print-object's
from time to time, but never a bug that caused the exact same object to
get printed, so I never went into recursion.

Believe it or not, when the stack runs out you can look at a backtrace
(cmd-B) and then use the thumb on the scroll bar to go back about 5000
stack frames (in my case) and see where the whole mess started: ie, what
object was being described (if I am not comepletely wrong on all of
this!!)

Hang in there, Manfred!