How should you read a Lisp file as Lisp for processing without condition-case?

Question

To help catch predictable errors, I've written my own linting tasks that read the code and report any inconsistencies it finds. One of the hackier pieces to this right now is the following function:

(defun lint-get-forms (filename)
  "Read FILENAME and return a list of its Lisp forms."
  (let ((pos 0) forms)
    (with-temp-buffer
      (insert-file-contents filename)
      (condition-case _
          (while t
            (when-let ((cell (read-from-string (buffer-string) pos)))
              (push (car cell) forms)
              (goto-char (setq pos (cdr cell)))))
        (error forms)))
    forms))

Is there a better way to do this (preferably without condition-case)?

_{Ideally these checks would be done at compile-time, but they're not stable enough yet to move to the other repository.}

Answer 1

See Drew's answer to a related question.

If you do not mind ignoring all errors (I do not know which errors read might signal), you should use ignore-errors. Otherwise, your error handler should probably be specific to end-of-file errors.

Personally, I take (sometimes guilty) pleasure in K&R-style and functional brevity, so I would write your function like this:

(defun lint-get-forms (filename)
  "Read FILENAME and return a list of its Lisp forms."
  (with-temp-buffer
    (let ((buf (current-buffer))
          forms)
      (insert-file-contents filename)
      (while (ignore-errors (push (read buf) forms)))
      (nreverse forms))))

Regardless of whether you find this while form too terse, I recommend using read over read-from-string, as the former is much more powerful in the type of its argument. If, for some reason I am missing, you are intent on using read-from-string, I suggest caching the result of buffer-string.

P.S. Is there a reason you are calling goto-char?