* Anton Kovalenko [2011-11-11 01:27] writes:

Hello SLIME developers,

Fancy-inspector module provides a feature that I tried to use today: for a stream object, it proposes to visit a file and go to current stream position. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in current SLIME.

In swank-fancy-inspector.lisp, make-pathname-ispec passes a :charpos keyword, while in slime.el, slime-ed expects :position.

I assume there's a real problem, not just an argument name incompatibility: for common CL implementations, CL:FILE-POSITION is measured in bytes, and slime-ed (that ends up in goto-char) expects character. Assuming unibyte encoding and passing :position argument from fancy inspector makes this feature useful most of the time, though.

I'm unsure where the real problem (octets-vs-characters) should be fixed; a problem with argument names looks like a separate one, because what's passed in :charpos is a byte offset.

Since the return value of FILE-POSITION is implementation dependent it seems that the Lisp side would be a more appropriate place. Emacs has a byte-to-position function but XEmacs hasn't. Turning file positions into line+column numbers would probably also work most of the time. Helmut