On Tuesday 13 March 2007 11:59, Drake Wilson wrote:

Actually it was just M-x slime; SBCL is the main CL installed on my machine.

Ok. (I recreated the complete output for reference)

WARNING: These Swank interfaces are unimplemented:  (CALLS-WHO DISASSEMBLE-FRAME SLDB-BREAK-AT-START SLDB-BREAK-ON-RETURN             WHO-BINDS WHO-CALLS WHO-MACROEXPANDS WHO-REFERENCES WHO-SETS             WHO-SPECIALIZES) T

debugger invoked on a SB-INT:SIMPLE-PROGRAM-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "initial thread" {10025EFA81}>: unknown &KEY argument: :EXTERNAL-FORMAT

Type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXT:QUIT) to exit from SBCL.

restarts (invokable by number or by possibly-abbreviated name):   0: [ABORT] Exit debugger, returning to top level.

(SWANK:START-SERVER "/tmp/slime.1772" :EXTERNAL-FORMAT :ISO-LATIN-1-UNIX) 0] backtrace

0: (SWANK:START-SERVER "/tmp/slime.23041" :EXTERNAL-FORMAT :ISO-LATIN-1-UNIX) 1: (SB-INT:SIMPLE-EVAL-IN-LEXENV (SWANK:START-SERVER "/tmp/slime.23041" :EXTERNAL-FORMAT :ISO-LATIN-1-UNIX) #<NULL-LEXENV>) 2: (INTERACTIVE-EVAL (SWANK:START-SERVER "/tmp/slime.23041" :EXTERNAL-FORMAT :ISO-LATIN-1-UNIX)) 3: (SB-IMPL::REPL-FUN NIL)

This is bogus. The swank:start-server function does not have an external-format part, there is a coding-system parameter.

In the slime changelog I do notice that some time ago this existed:

2004-11-19 Helmut Eller heller@common-lisp.net

... (start-server): Accept external-format as argument.

But this went away in

2006-11-19 Helmut Eller heller@common-lisp.net

.. * swank.lisp (compile-file-for-emacs): Use guess-external-format. (swank:create-server): no more accepts an :external-format 'enc , use :coding-system "enc" instead.

So I'm guessing your cl-swank and slime packages are out of sync and the backwards compatibility of slime leaves something to be desired.

Slime maintainers: what is the official word on this?

I could stronger dependencies to the next upload but as slime can be used to connect to a non-local lisp instance this is a problem that will be difficult to avoid.

Groetjes, Peter