From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Quirk in Emacs-Lisp code block evaluation
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:02:51 -0600
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	Snyder's message of "Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:30:49 -0400")
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To: Matthew Snyder <matthew.c.snyder@gmail.com>
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org

Matthew Snyder <matthew.c.snyder@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello -
>
> I noticed today as I was playing with code blocks that some results
> are prematurely truncated, possibly because they contain nil as a
> first element and are thus considered empty return values.
>
> Consider:
>
>
>     #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
>     '(a nil nil b)
>     #+END_SRC
>
>     #+results:
>     | a | nil | nil | b |
>
> But then:
>
>     #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
>     '(nil nil nil b)
>     #+END_SRC
>
>     #+results:
>
> I'm using Emacs 24.0.50.1 and Org Mode 7.6, ELPA version 20110728.
>

Interesting corner case.

If you place a ":results scalar" header argument onto the code block,
then you get reasonable results

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :results scalar
  '(nil nil nil nil)
#+end_src

#+results:
: (nil nil nil nil)

However when the results are converted into a table, the
`orgtbl-to-orgtbl' which ultimately calls the `orgtbl-to-generic'
function turns '(nil nil nil nil) into "".  This may be something to
look at in the future, but for now I'm hesitant to touch such a central
function.

Cheers -- Eric

>
> --
> Matthew Snyder

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/