Dear SLUGGERS, 

I have just downloaded and compiled the version of CLISP that Bruno Haible,
Michael Stoll, Marcus Daniels, Pierpaolo Bernadini and Sam Steingold
have put together.  The version in question is copyrighted 2002 by B.H.
and Sam Steingold.  While (load "tests") and (run-all-tests) work fine
(except for a floating point contagion warning which I have corrected by
setting the appropriate variable to nil), when I try a simple defun,
such as: 

(defun fact (n) 
(if (> n 0) 
(* n (fact (- n 1))) 
1)) 

comes up with a message like: 

"*** - POSITION: :START = 1 should not be greater than :END = 0" after
one line when invoked from the shell or two lines when invoked as an
inferior-lisp process in Emacs.* 

I have discovered, however that if if restrict a defun to one line (automatic
wraparounds don't matter) that all goes well (i.e. > (defun fact (n) (if (> n
 0) (* n (fact(- n 1))) 1))"\n" result is the correct response: >FACT"\n",
and that function "FACT" then works fine.

So I conclude that I have some sort of formatting problem, and that the problem
is inside CLISP or the CLISP shell: it is definitely not the fault of 
GNU emacs, and occurs under ZSH and TCSH as well as BASH.  Can anybody help me
with this.  Incidentally, I downloaded and compiled GCL, which, while it has
some problems of a more lisp-ish nature (e.g some problems with macros),
certainly doesn't have this one.  I conclude that I have probably done (or not
done) something in editing "config.lisp" (I just altered the editor from "vi"
to "emacs" (although not altering it didn't make any difference) and filled in
the short and long site names, which, if I understand correctly, is for internet
activities or networkng and shouldn't have any bearing on formatting. In any
case, any suggestions would be appreciated.

I am running Red Hat Linux 9.0 on an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ and compiled
the "clisp" executable as a Unix platform.  I have used CLISP before in
a previous Slackware distribution and it ran fine.  The problem is
probably very simple and probably involves the editing of
"config.lisp".  Can you provide me with any hints.  I would be most
grateful if so. 

Yours faithfully, 
Dr Malcolm Johnston 

* This, in turn, produces a #<SIMPLE-ERROR ...> message, where the "..."
seem to be a memory address. 



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