Troubleshooting
Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on, as adults we'd be able to read them.
—Alan Perlis
When you buy a new appliance such as a television, it comes with an instruction booklet that lists troubleshooting hints in the following form:
PROBLEM: Nothing works.
Diagnosis: Power is off.
Remedy: Plug in outlet and turn on power switch.
If your Lisp compiler came without such a handy instruction booklet, this chapter may be of some help. It lists some of the most common difficulties that Lisp programmers encounter.
25.1 Nothing Happens
PROBLEM: You type an expression to Lisp’s read-eval-print loop and get no response—no result, no prompt.
Diagnosis: There are two likely reasons why output wasn’t printed: either Lisp is still ...
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