By the way, I understand the problem easily now. The symbol 'dbus' has the prefix 'db' and when the example file is read 'dbus' becomes 'cl-destructuring-bindus'. This happens at read-time well before evaluation or byte-compilation.

It happens to occur inside a 'load' or 'require' form (didn't check), but it's completely unrelated to that operation specifically. The file intended to be loaded is completely isolated. This is just a misunderstanding of what shorthands were designed for and how they work. If anything is missing in the manual, feel free to add.

João Távora

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 11:52 João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> wrote:

Here's the reply I meant to send to the tracker but sent to Eli only on accident: 

Shorthands are read at file read-time and specified exclusively as per-file variables. So I don't understand this about inheritance from load. Also they were designed to abbreviate prefixes, not full symbol names, so the db idea is probably not going to work. As far as I remember, these things were well explained in the manual...

João

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 07:41 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> From: "David J. Rosenbaum" <djr7c4@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:58:06 -0700
>
> Hello,
>
> I am using read-symbol-shorthands to alias db to
> cl-destructuring-bind. It works but causes problems when I load a file
> containing a symbol that starts with db. For example, one can use emacs -Q
> with the following file.
>
> ================================================================
> (require 'tramp-gvfs)
>
> ;; Local Variables:
> ;; read-symbol-shorthands: (("db" . "cl-destructuring-bind"))
> ;; End:
> ================================================================
>
> To reproduce, save the above and load it with M-x load-file. This
> results in the following error.
>
> ================================================================
> Loading /home/david/tmp/read-symbol-example.el (source)...
> byte-code: Cannot open load file: No such file or directory, cl-destructuring-bindus
> ================================================================
>
> The problem seems to be that tramp-gvfs requires dbus and db is being
> replaced with cl-destructuring-bind. IMO, loaded files should not inherit
> shorthands from files that require them since those shorthands are only
> valid for that particular file.

Thanks, I hope João (CC'ed) will have some ideas or suggestions.