[PATCH 0/2] Levenshtein-based suggestions (v3)

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat dot com>]

On Thu, 2015-09-17 at 13:31 -0600, Jeff Law wrote:
> On 09/16/2015 02:34 AM, Richard Biener wrote:
> >
> > Btw, this looks quite expensive - I'm sure we want to limit the effort
> > here a bit.
> A limiter is reasonable, though as it's been pointed out this only fires 
> during error processing, so we probably have more leeway to take time 
> and see if we can do better error recovery.
> 
> FWIW, I've used this algorithm in totally unrelated projects and while 
> it seems expensive, it's worked out quite nicely.
> 
> >
> > So while the idea might be an improvement to selected cases it can cause
> > confusion as well.  And if using the suggestion for further parsing it can
> > cause worse followup errors (unless we can limit such "fixup" use to the
> > cases where we can parse the result without errors).  Consider
> >
> > foo()
> > {
> >    foz = 1;
> > }
> >
> > if we suggest 'foo' instead of foz then we'll get a more confusing followup
> > error if we actually use it.
> True.  This kind of problem is probably inherent in this kind of "I'm 
> going assume you meant..." error recovery mechanisms.
> 
> And just to be clear, even in a successful recovery scenario, we still 
> issue an error.  The error recovery is just meant to try and give the 
> user a hint what might have gone wrong and gracefully handle the case 
> where they just made a minor goof.  Obviously the idea here is to cut 
> down on the number of iterations of edit-compile cycle one has to do :-)
> 
> 
> Jeff

The typename suggestion seems to be at least somewhat controversial,
whereas (I hope) the misspelled field names suggestion is more
acceptable.

Hence I'm focusing on the field name lookup for now; other uses of the
algorithm (e.g. the typename lookup) could be done in followup patches,
but I'm deferring them for now in the hope of getting the simplest case
into trunk as a first step.  Similarly, for simplicity, I didn't
implement any attempt at error-recovery using the hint.

The following patch kit is in two parts (for ease of review; they would
be applied together):

  patch 1: Implement Levenshtein distance
  patch 2: C FE: suggest corrections for misspelled field names

I didn't implement a limiter, on the grounds that this only fires
once per "has no member named" error, and so is unlikely to slow
things down noticeably.

Successfully bootstrapped&regrtested the combination of these two
on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (adds 11 new PASS results to gcc.sum)

OK for trunk?

 gcc/Makefile.in                                  |   1 +
 gcc/c/c-typeck.c                                 |  70 +++++++++++-
 gcc/spellcheck.c                                 | 136 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 gcc/spellcheck.h                                 |  32 ++++++
 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/plugin/levenshtein-test-1.c |   9 ++
 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/plugin/levenshtein_plugin.c |  64 +++++++++++
 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/plugin/plugin.exp           |   1 +
 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/spellcheck-fields.c         |  63 +++++++++++
 8 files changed, 375 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
 create mode 100644 gcc/spellcheck.c
 create mode 100644 gcc/spellcheck.h
 create mode 100644 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/plugin/levenshtein-test-1.c
 create mode 100644 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/plugin/levenshtein_plugin.c
 create mode 100644 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/spellcheck-fields.c

-- 
1.8.5.3