Re: Suggestion: empty lines between errors and warnings

[Donn Terry <donn at interix dot com>]

I have mixed feelings about this, and wanted to make an alternate
suggestion.

First, I agree that reading multiline error messages can be difficult
because of the visual clutter, and that something like line separators
would help.  On the other hand, getting more on a single screenful
is also helpful, and separators work against that (particularly in
the case of single-line messages).

So, how about two "goal" rules for new or revised messages?

1) Allowing for the interpolation of a reasonably long identifier
   (say, 15 characters), no single line of an error message should
   exceed 80 characters in width.
2) All lines but the first of an error message should be indented
   a few (2?) characters.  In the example below, I've also included
   a | in the first column, which might make it much more effective
   in the face of varying width of the filename/line prefix.

Thus errors would look like:
<filename>:<line>: blather fjkdlsa fj b more blather identifier.
<filename>:<line>: | extended blather on a related topic
<filename>:<line>: | and to really emphasize your coding error.
<filename>:<line>: grumpiness on some new topic.

The goal is to provide a visual clue as to where a given message
starts and ends, without taking up much more space.  (I can live
with it the way it is, but I wanted to suggest this as an alternative
to blank lines.)

Donn

Harald Harders wrote:
> 
> Dear egcs developer.
> 
> This is not really an error report but rather a suggestion.
> 
> In C++ with egcs (egcs-2.91.66 19990314 (egcs-1.1.2 release)) error
> messages and warnings are sometimes very long over a couple of lines. So
> reading them is confusing.
> It would make it easier to understand an seperate them by an empty line
> between different messages.
> 
> Is it possible to add this feature for C++. In C and Fortran this is not
> necessary since there the messages are shorter.
> 
> Yours
> Harald
> 
> --
>  __/|__  Harald Harders              Mail: harald.harders@dlr.de
> /_/_/_/  DLR                         Tel.: (05 31) 2 95 - 26 78
>   |/     Institut fuer Flugmechanik  Fax.: (05 31) 2 95 - 26 47
>     DLR  Lilienthalplatz 7         http://www.fm.bs.dlr.de/flugmechanik/
>          D-38108 Braunschweig      http://mbpc06.mb.ing.tu-bs.de/~harders/

-- 

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Donn Terry                  mailto:donn@interix.com
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