Re: Temporarily suppress all error messages

Leo,
I am indeed using the most recent version of Maxima (5.49) and I do the
terminal most of the time. (If I ever use anything else, it's XMaxima). So
the Lisp command you mentioned is workable for me!

Michel,
I tried out your version of the command, and it seems to do well in
suppressing the "not enough parentheses", "too many parentheses", and
"expected n arguments but got k" sorts of messages, and these are the ones
which I get very often and which I was having trouble suppressing. Not only
that, but the command also interacts with my syntax (which involves the
double-quotes and the user-defined nofix "~" along with a whole bunch of
stuff in my preamble) in a way that causes it to print output lines with
empty brackets on them, which is exactly what I was hoping for it to do in
these cases!

So this command seems like the perfect help for my use case, and I've
included it in my preamble. I might post again if I encounter any issues
with it that I can't fix, but as near as I can tell it seems like it will
work nicely.

Thank you all so much for your help!
Astrea

On Tue, May 19, 2026 at 9:39 AM Leo Butler <[email protected]> wrote:

> If you are using a recent version of maxima, you can do the following at
> the terminal:
>
> :lisp(setf *error-output* (make-output-string-stream))
>
> Alternatively, you can save the line
>
> (setf *error-output* (make-output-string-stream))
>
> in a start-up file (e.g. maxima-init.lisp) and make sure it gets loaded
> at start-up.
>
> Explanation: in recent versions of Maxima, errors and warnings are
> printed to the output stream *ERROR-OUTPUT*. That can be rebound to a
> "string stream", which results in the diversion of the error messages to
> a sink.
>
> Best regards,
> Leo
>
>
> On Tue, May 19 2026, Michel Talon <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Le 19/05/2026 à 04:52, Astrea Drifter a écrit :
> >>
> >> 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.
> >
> > A little pedagogy: a lot of errors in maxima trigger the function
> > merror, which outputs the appropriate error message. In lisp you can
> > redefine any function, so when doing  (defun merror(&rest foo) nil)
> > you are just redefining merror to produce nil, for whatever arguments
> > you feed merror with (&rest foo). Idem for mtell which is triggered by
> > less severe problems. But this does not work for your use case because
> > the error is produced at the level of the parser (nparse.lisp) in
> > which errors do not call merror or mtell, but just use the lisp
> > function format to output a message.
> >
> > (format t (intl:gettext "incorrect syntax: "))  line 122 of nparse.lisp
> >
> > followed by some more complex stuff to output the cause of the error,
> > here ~ is not an infix operator ...
> >
> > Since you probably don't want to redefine lisp functions, i don't see
> > how to mute this error message.
>
> --
> ---
> Best regards,
> Dr Butler
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima-discuss mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/maxima-discuss
>

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