Re: new parser: error recovery needs work

[dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)]

> To be honest, I'm somewhat unsympathetic.  Not because I think the error
> messages are good, or because I think that we shouldn't do better, but
> because it's hard to do better in some of these cases and because
> we do noticably better in other cases -- the old parser just said
> "parse error" a lot. :-)

I certainly understand Mark's reaction here. I agree that it is unreasonable
to label as a regression particular cases in which the error message may or
may not be worse than the previous one (these things are somewhat subjective
after all).

I think the best thing is to recognize that we are never talking about a bug
when it comes to an unclear error message, but merely a possibly opportunity
for improving things. It is almost worth having a special category for such
suggestions. 

One of my particular interests in the Ada parser has been to work on improving
the error messages (also improving error messages in the semantic analysis
pass). I find that if people report a bad error message as a bug, I am less
sympathetic than if they report it as "here is a case of a message that i
found confusing, would be nice to better if possible" :-)