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Just spent a good half hour pulling my hair out trying to figure out why one of the #elisp functions I had just written was always returning nil when I tested it. Turns out, my test was mistakenly passing its inputs to the wrong (but similarly named) function (pivot-table-get-columns instead of pivot-table-get-body).

#Haskell's type system would've caught this. 🙃

#emacs #lisp

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

It sounds like the sort of thing a more type-ful Lisp implementation would have detected too. I bet SBCL would have have given you a compiler note warning of an analogous problem, for example.
This entry was edited (1 hour ago)
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

This is why C89 wisely limits external symbols to 6 significant characters.

/s

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