Why is dribble producing an empty file?

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I am trying to learn Common Lisp with the book Common Lisp: A gentle introduction to Symbolic Computation. In addition, I am using SBCL, Emacs, and Slime.

By the end of chapter 9, the author shows the dribble tool. He shows the following:

enter image description here enter image description here

I tried to reproduce the commands presented by the author. Considering the inputs, the only difference was the fact that I put a different location to save the file. In my environment, I did:

CL-USER> (dribble "/home/pedro/miscellaneous/misc/symbolic-computation/teste-tool.log")
; No value
CL-USER> (cons 2 nil)
(2)
CL-USER> '(is driblle really working?)
(IS DRIBLLE REALLY WORKING?)
CL-USER> "is dribble useful at all?"
"is dribble useful at all?"
CL-USER> (dribble)
; No value

The file was indeed created:

$ readlink -f teste-tool.log 
/home/pedro/miscellaneous/misc/symbolic-computation/teste-tool.log

Note that I did not get messages such as "Now recording in file --location---" in the REPL while I was typing. But this may vary according to the Lisp implementation.

The big surprise was that, unfortunately, the file was empty. Thus, dribble did not work as expected.

Did I do something wrong?

sbcl slime read-eval-print-loop common-lisp
1 Answers

  1. Yes, by default, within Slime I don't think this works.

  2. It will work within the SBCL Repl:

āžœ sbcl
This is SBCL 2.0.1.debian, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses.  See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
* (dribble "dribble-test.lisp")
* (* 8 5)

40
* "Will this work?"

"Will this work?"
* (dribble)

* %

Which can be confirmed:

āžœ cat dribble-test.lisp
* (* 8 5)

40
* "Will this work?"

"Will this work?"
* (dribble)

  1. Saving "REPL history" seems less useful with Slime IMO because of all the "non-REPL evaluation" that you do by e.g. selecting a function or an expression or region and evaluating that in the REPL.

  2. To actually save and view history within Slime, see slime-repl-save-history and associated functions; you can even merge histories from independent Repls if you so choose :-)

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