Emacs lua-mode issue: (void-function interactively-called-p)

Question

I'm trying to install lua-mode (version 20110428) for emacs 21.4.1 and am having problems. In my .emacs file I've got:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lua-mode/")
...
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.lua$" . lua-mode) auto-mode-alist))
(autoload 'lua-mode "lua-mode" "Lua editing mode." t)

I used the installation instructions from here: http://lua-mode.luaforge.net/ Also, in my .emacs.d/ dir I have lua-mode/ which contains lua-mode.el. All of those files have the correct permissions.

Except now when I use emacs to open the new file "test.lua" I get the following message in the scratch buffer:

"File mode specification error: (void-function called-interactively-p)"

I'm running RHEL5. I've looked online but haven't found much help. Does anyone have any suggestions? I don't know any LISP (so it's hard to debug lua-mode.el) and apart from a handful of shortcuts, I don't know that much about emacs.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You are using a version of Emacs that doesn't have the version of the "called-interactively-p" function that takes 1 argument (earlier versions of the function didn't take an argument). You can get around this by putting this workaround (posted here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/115598/raw ) in your Emacs init file:

(condition-case nil (called-interactively-p 'interactive)
  (error
   ; Save reference to called-interactively-p in
   ; inglorion-system-called-interactively-p
   (fset 'inglorion-system-called-interactively-p
         (symbol-function 'called-interactively-p))
   ; Define called-interactively-p so that it discards
   ; its arguments and calls inglorion-system-called-interactively-p
   (fset 'called-interactively-p
         (lambda (&rest args)
           (inglorion-system-called-interactively-p)))))

However, when I did this and attempted to test with Emacs 22, I encountered other errors as well due to certain functions not being present so you may have to upgrade your version of Emacs if you want to use lua-mode.

With Emacs 23 & 24, "lua-mode.el" seems to work (I'm not a lua programmer so I couldn't test it properly) with existing lua files but breaks when you attempt to create a new lua file. It's actually a bug in the "lua-mode.el" code that occurs when you try to open a new lua file (it doesn't occur if you attempt to open an existing lua file). The problem is that the "remove-text-properties" call at line# 1218 (in the "lua-unmark-multiline-literals" function) is calling the "remove-text-properties" function with a begin value of "1" and an end value of "0" (it's "0" because the buffer-size is "0" for a new file. You can fix this by changing line# 1218 from:

    (remove-text-properties (or begin 1) (or end (buffer-size)) '(syntax-table ()))

to:

    (remove-text-properties (or begin 1)
                            (or end
                                (if (> (buffer-size) 0)
                                    (buffer-size)
                                  (or begin 1)))
                            '(syntax-table ()))

You should let the developer of "lua-mode.el" know about the bug and possibly also request support for earlier Emacs versions.

Answer 2

I happen to be the maintainer of lua-mode. I was lucky to stumble upon your problem when surfing on the internet and I the problem was solved after someone generously provided a backup implementation of called-interactively-p function.

Meanwhile, I must admit I was well aware that called-interactively logics were changed somewhere before emacs23, but I didn't bother changing it until someone would have filed it as a bug. This is merely an effort optimization since there've been numerous internal API changes in Emacs recently and fixing them preemptively simply doesn't fit into my timetable.

The bottomline is that:

1. I'll provide the backup implementation of called-interactively-p within lua-mode in nearest future which will get to next release.
2. And I'd like to encourage you to file such malfunctions as bugreports here . I'm reading them regularly and your reports as well as your own hacks are welcome upstream.

Cheers, immerrr.

Answer 3

I think the function `called-interactively-p' just did not exist in Emacs 21.4.

But actually, I think you are talking about XEmacs, not GNU Emacs. Note that these are 2 different projects.

You should upgrade your XEmacs to 21.5 beta, or better (YMMV), use GNU Emacs 23 probably.

Answer 4

I had this problem as well. I was able to fix it by changing it to say:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.lua\\'" . lua-mode))

I can't claim to know why this makes a difference: I extrapolated from some other logic to load javascript mode which used a similar syntax to describe the file extension.