Improving C++ error output?

[Timothy J. Wood]

On Friday, December 20, 2002, at 02:20  PM, Joe Buck wrote:
>> Has there been any work towards making g++ error output easily
>> machine-readable?  E.g., a command-line flag --error-format=xml 
>> causing
>> errors to be output in XML.  If I did some work toward this end, would
>> it have a shot at being accepted into the g++ tree?
>
> I'm not sure that this is the right approach.  If you can do something
> intelligent in a post processor, it could probably be done better 
> inside
> the compiler where more information is available.

   If you are running at the command line, maybe, but this is 
vanishingly rare for some of us these days (running gcc under Project 
Builder on Mac OS X, say).  If there was a nice machine readable error 
format, an IDE could have a much easier time providing advanced 
features.  For example, in the case of multiple alternatives for an 
ambiguously typed function call, the IDE could provide hyperlinks to 
each of those functions using its internal indexing capabilities.

-tim