Re: ispell-get-line: Wrong type argument: stringp, ni

[Thomas S. Dye]

Hi Drew,

On Dec 26, 2009, at 7:57 AM, Drew Adams wrote:

This problem "went away" without any apparent intervention from me.  

Looking at the cocoAspell web site again, perhaps this was

the culprit:

In some rare case the first time you spell check a

document, cocoAspell may fail to come up with a list

of suggestions. It happens because the spell server

needs some time to load the dictionary and initialize

itself. The client application simply times out on the

spell checking request and behaves as there were no

suggestions. This may not happen at all if you have a

fast machine.

Apologies for the noise level.

My guess is that the text you quoted is irrelevant here.

A wrong-type arg error is a product bug, even if it is often only a minor
problem. Please try to reproduce it, starting with `emacs -Q', and then report
it using `M-x report-emacs-bug'.

Often, such a bug occurs because of a lack of proper initialization of something
(typically a variable that is supposed to be a string is nil by default).

The same code that raises the error often performs initialization, so after the
error has been raised once, initialization has occurred and the error is never
raised again. That can explain why it "went away without any apparent
intervention from you." There is nevertheless a bug.

I appreciate your perspective here and admire the combination of skills, knowledge, and intellect that would guide someone to reproduce the state of such a complex system.  That combination doesn't describe me, however, and I'm not able to reproduce the error message starting with emacs-Q (though I was pleased to find that I could do enough to raise two other errors that were familiar to me through my configuration trials).  I wish I was able to do more.

In response to your final paragraph, I did observe the error repeatedly as I tried the various menu items that launch a spell check: the various options under Edit/Spell and the AucTeX one under Command/Spell.  I don't know if this observation bears directly on the problem, but it came to mind when I read your last paragraph, and I am passing it along in the hope that it might prove interesting to you.

All the best,

Tom