bug#52003: Unexpected advising behavior due to recursive implementation

[Daniel Sausner]

Hi,

I stumbled [1] on an issue that seems to affect several functions [2] in 
lisp/emacs-lisp/lisp.el. For the sake of brevity I'll sketch it only for 
forward-sexp but the problematic code is effectively duplicated and was 
introduced with a commit [3] about one year ago.

Here's the problem: Since the commit any advice on the function 
forward-sexp will effectively be called twice before the actual code 
runs in interactive mode. In non-interactive mode everthing is as 
expected however.

The reason is the introduction of an error message if no 
forward/backward sexp is found. This is implemented in a way that the 
functions calls itself immediately again and scans for errors:

(defun forward-sexp (&optional arg interactive)
  "..."
  (interactive "^p\nd")
  (if interactive
      (condition-case _
          (forward-sexp arg nil)              <-- Recursion
        (scan-error (user-error (if (> arg 0)
                                    "No next sexp"
                                  "No previous sexp"))))
    (or arg (setq arg 1))
    (if forward-sexp-function
        (funcall forward-sexp-function arg)
      (goto-char (or (scan-sexps (point) arg) (buffer-end arg)))
      (if (< arg 0) (backward-prefix-chars)))))

In my (very) humble opinion that method of error catching was an 
unfortunate choice in that regard, that it makes the advising very 
counter-intuitive.

I'm far from a lisp expert but my feeling is that the condition-case 
should only wrap the calls where things can actually go wrong.

If there is interest, I'd be happy to provide a patch :-)

Best regards,
Daniel


[1] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil/issues/1541

[2] On a first glimpse at least: forward-sexp, forward-list, down-list, 
kill-sexp in that particular file.

[3] Commit:

df0f32f04850e7ed106a225addfa82f1b5b91f45
Author:     Mattias Engdegård <mattiase@acm.org>
AuthorDate: Fri Sep 18 12:49:33 2020 +0200
Commit:     Mattias Engdegård <mattiase@acm.org>
CommitDate: Wed Sep 23 16:31:18 2020 +0200

Don't signal scan-error when moving by sexp interactively