Re: Temporarily suppress all error messages

I try to dodge all the problems with handling text output by calling 
print with a sentinel value and treating anything between input and that 
value as output or side-effect output that I can capture and display, at 
the expense of a more noisy protocol.

Chris.


------ Original Message ------
From "Leo Butler" <[email protected]>
To "Michel Talon" <[email protected]>
Cc "[email protected]" 
<[email protected]>
Date 19/05/2026 17:32:01
Subject Re: [Maxima-discuss] Temporarily suppress all error messages

>Thanks, Barton. The hazards of auto-complete.
>
>Michel, Re: MTELL messages.
>
>I have come to hate MTELL. In the course of working on Yamwi, where we
>try to corral all the various messages, warnings and errors from Maxima,
>MTELL has stood out for me as being the most carelessly crafted way to
>dump text to a terminal. In my opinion, if Maxima needs to communicate a
>message to the user that is not a question, then it is at least a
>warning and should be printed by MWARNING (which prints to
>*ERROR-OUTPUT*). Indeed, when I grep src/*.lisp for calls to MTELL, it
>looks like virtually every such call is a warning or an error message. I
>don't understand why MWARNING is not used for these messages.
>
>That's my ¢2.
>
>Leo
>
>
>On Tue, May 19 2026, Michel Talon <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>  Le 19/05/2026 à 17:52, Barton Willis a écrit :
>>
>>>  Should :lisp(setf *error-output* (make-output-string-stream)) be
>>>  :lisp(setf *error-output* (make-string-output-stream))?
>>>
>>>
>>  You are right, this works, the other doesn't, because
>>  make-output-string-stream is a function in sbcl-impl etc.
>>
>>  This being said seeing all format output suppressed seems to me quite
>>  strange. Moreover this also kills merror messages,
>>
>>  but not mtell messages, so in my opinion should be discouraged.
>>
>>  (%i1) :lisp(setf *error-output* (make-string-output-stream))
>>
>>  #<STRING-OUTPUT-STREAM {1201BA2CE3}>
>>  (%i1) "1/0"~;
>>
>>  (%i1) ?merror("What a mess");
>>
>>  (%i2) ?mtell("What a mess");
>>  What a mess(%o2)                                false
>
>--
>---
>Best regards,
>Dr Butler
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