C++ alternative tokens in the preprocessor

[Stan Shebs]

"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