Re: Semantic error recovery

sasghm@unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill) writes:
> I would suggest that the "appallingly bad error handling" of "most
> commercial compilers" is partly a matter of perspecitve and largely a
> response to market demand rather than a consequence of ignorance or
> lack of effort.


When TauMetric first wrote their compiler, they put a lot of effort into
having good error messages. But customers complained bitterly and
demanded that the error messages be just like other UNIX compilers. A
quote from someone at TauMetric (I assume Mike Ball): "These [error]
messages are crude, giving only file name and line number, but they seem
to be what a lot of the UNIX and MSDOS hackers want. They have written
emacs (or brief) macros to parse these messages and move the cursor around
in the editor."


    - David Olsen
        olsen@verdix.com
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