Re: broken FE diagnostics wrt complex expressions

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Tom Tromey wrote:

> Aldy> Are there any thoughts on this (the PRs, the caret diagnostics, plan of
> Aldy> attack, etc?).
>
> Caret diagnostics do seem like the way to go.

Yes, I've advocated that for years.  People consistently tell me that 
EDG's diagnostics are superior to GCC, in part because of EDG's use of 
carets.  As far as I know, EDG does not have the capability to show 
preprocessed source (as Joseph suggests), but I agree that this would be 
a useful capability.

I suspect that even without fully accurate token information from the 
parsers, caret diagnostics would be an improvement.  Some of these 
problems that we consistently struggle with (printing complex 
expressions, using the same spellings of keywords and types that the 
user did, etc.) would be significantly improved by using carets -- even 
if the carets didn't point in exactly the right place.

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery
mark@codesourcery.com
(650) 331-3385 x713