Bug#238811: emacs21: inappropriately complains 'Wrong type argument: number-or-marker-p'

[Reid Priedhorsky]

Sven,

I'm triaging old Emacs bugs.

Thanks for doing this! I'm sure with a package like Emacs it must be quite a task. Your e-mail prompted me to do some binary searching on my .emacs and finally make some progress on this very old annoyance.

  1. When spell-checking using ispell. After finding a misspelled word, Emacs
     highlights it and brings up a buffer offering some replacements, each one
     tagged with a digit. What is supposed to happen is that I type the digit,
     and that replacement is substituted; what actually happens is that Emacs
     complains with the message above. There are several other command that
     one can give ispell at this point; those work, but typing a letter which
     is not a valid command gives the same message.

1. Create a file "dotemacs-test" with the contents (one line):

      (setq help-char "\M-h")

2. Run emacs with "emacs -q -l dotemacs-test".

4. Type M-$ (meta-shift-4).
5. Emacs opens a small buffer "*Choices*" with the following content:

      (0) glob  (1) glop  (2) glow  (3) g lox  (4) g-lox  (5) lox

6. Type the character "1".

Expected behavior:

- In the scratch buffer, "glox" is replaced with "glop".

Actual behavior:

- No replacement. Emacs complains (in the minibuffer):

     Wrong type argument: number-or-marker-p, "\350"

OK, here's a specific recipe to reproduce. This is with emacs21 version 21.4a+1-5.6. 3. Type the characters "glox" into the *scratch* buffer. (I assume any misspelled word will work. I use the American dictionary.)

If you are still seeing this, please send a Lisp backtrace for the error
(use M-x toggle-debug-on-error to enable the backtrace) and also check
if this appears in "emacs21 -q".

Here you go on the backtrace:

It does happen with emacs -q (on my system emacs -> emacs21). It also does not happen if I comment out the line noted in step #1 above from my regular .emacs.

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument number-or-marker-p "è")
  ispell-command-loop(("glob" "glop" "glow" "g lox" "g-lox" "lox") nil "glox" #<marker 
at 1 in *scratch*> #<marker at 5 in *scratch*>)
  byte-code("Ä^...@^haaa@^H@    \n%

For case #2 (file changed on disk), I have attached the backtrace as it seems to contain some funny characters which prevent me from pasting it.

Also, do you see this with emacs22 as well?

Please let me know what additional help I can provide.

Thanks,

Reid

--
http://blog.reidster.net

I haven't tried emacs22. I tend to resist Emacs version upgrades because the changelogs are so massive and it takes a while to read them and figure out what's going to affect me. However, I can install it and try if needed.

case2-backtrace
Description: Binary data