Temporarily suppress all error messages

Greetings all,

I gathered in the manual that any questions can be posted here, even very
simple ones. Here is my best explanation of my use case:

I have a syntax which (among other features) prints an empty list when an
error is detected. This can be a numerical error such as division by zero,
or a syntax error such as misplaced parentheses. I am interested in
creating a command which will additionally suppress all error messages, so
that nothing but the empty list will be printed in the case of an error.
My rationale is that, in the vast majority of instances in which an error
occurs, I already know what went wrong: either I misplaced a parenthesis
somewhere, or I forgot one of the arguments to a function, or some such
mistake. I can find and fix these mistakes easily enough, and in such
cases, it seems pointless and annoying to have my screen cluttered up by
error messages telling me what I already know while I fix my work.

I am of course aware that errors can occur for reasons that I wouldn't have
expected, and so I'm looking for a command that can also be reversed when
necessary, to turn error messages back on. The "errormsg" command is
capable of doing all the things I want, in certain situations:

(%i86) errormsg:true$

(%i87) "1/0"~;

expt: undefined: 0 to a negative exponent.
(%o87) []
(%i88) errormsg:false$

(%i89) "1/0"~;
(%o89) []

Unfortunately, this doesn't work all the time:

(%i90) errormsg:true$

(%i91) "(1/1"~;
incorrect syntax: Missing )
(1/1$
   ^
(%o91) []
(%i92) errormsg:false$

(%i93) "(1/1"~;
incorrect syntax: Missing )
(1/1$
   ^
(%o93) []

While searching for solutions, I found a thread where the following
commands were recommended to turn off error and warning messages
respectively, and these seemed well suited for the use case of that
thread's op:

:lisp (defun merror(&rest foo) nil)
:lisp (defun mtell (&rest foo) nil)
Unfortunately, while I have some experience with Maxima, I know
nothing at all about Lisp. The commands do not work as given (which is
not to my surprise) and I have no idea how to make them do any of the
things I would want them to be doing.
Can someone relate to me the sort of syntax that would be needed to
make these commands do anything of the sort? Alternatively, does
anyone have a command that might work better for this purpose?

Thanks in advance for any help,
Astrea

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