Re: new parser: error recovery needs work

[Phil Edwards <phil at jaj dot com>]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 02:23:51PM +1100, Gareth Pearce wrote:
> *chuckle* - well as always I'm interested in volunteering, whether i'll
> actually end up doing anything - thats a different story.  My interest to
> effort conversion engine is rather inefficient
> Is there a branch/somewhere this is being worked on?

Somewhere, yes; a branch, not at present.  Look in the list archives for
recent messages containing the word 'caret' from Neil Booth in this list.


> > > or something at least.  A tool which could look up
> > > the documentation just by passing it the text of an error message ...
> would
> > > be nice too.
> >
> > You really don't want to rely on the text of an error message not changing
> > over time.  For this kind of thing to work, we need error messages to have
> > numbers (like every other compiler does, and with reason).
> 
> Well either that or expect people who change error messages to update the
> documentation :P
> not like that would happen...

It's not the documentation that would need updating (well, it would, but
that's not the killer).  It's the lookup tool you're proposing that would
need to know about the new error text that it's using as a "lookup key".

If, OTOH, you're assuming that the text of the error message itself is
in the documentation verbatim, and you want a tool to find it when giving
the error message, I refer you to "grep".  :-)


Phil

-- 
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, viz. "How
not to make a mess of it," has /not/ been met.
                                                 - Edsger Dijkstra, 1930-2002