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Re: C++ alternative tokens in the preprocessor
- To: "Martin v. Loewis" <martin at loewis dot home dot cs dot tu-berlin dot de>
- Subject: Re: C++ alternative tokens in the preprocessor
- From: Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>
- Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 14:07:04 -0700
- CC: zack at wolery dot cumb dot org, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- References: <200007180742.JAA29205@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de> <20000718011537.K7027@wolery.cumb.org> <200007181850.UAA01051@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de> <20000718124510.U7027@wolery.cumb.org> <200007182041.WAA01826@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de>
"Martin v. Loewis" wrote:
>
> > This is not a good error message. It expects the user to know gritty
> > details of the official grammar. I would much rather see something
> > like
> >
> > a.cc:1:9: "and" is not a legal macro name in C++
>
[...]
>
> I'd appreciate comments and recommendations from native speakers of
> the English language what terminology would be acceptable.
I would suggest "not a valid macro name", or the slightly more wordy
"cannot be used as a macro name" (it's also passive, which is usually
bad, but in this situation it sounds more deferential, which is a good
way to calm the about-to-go-into-a-towering-rage programmer seeing the
message :-) ).
Stan