Re: Semantic error recovery

Our esteemed moderator writes:
>[How many people find it useful for a compiler to chug through and try to
>parse and diagnose an entire file in the presence of errors? I'm just as
>happy with one that finds a few errors and gives up so I can go fix them.


I don't like compilers that give up right away, I'd prefer to be able to
set a threshhold ("Give me 20 errors, max!"), especially if it's a
compiler that takes a long time to get off the ground. However, my
students constantly fix *just* the first error and recompile... (or like
the student today: just type anything and recompile - the Ada compiler was
complaining that there were two parameters to a PUT procedure where only
one was expected, the student changed the comma to a semicolon and
recompiled. When I asked him why, he said "I just know intitively what to
do!")
--
Debora Weber-Wulff, Professorin fuer Softwaretechnik und
snail: Technische Fachhochschule Berlin, FB Informatik,
              Luxemburgerstr. 10, 13353 Berlin, Germany
email: weberwu@tfh-berlin.de
[I should emphasize that when I said I'd be happy with a compiler that
reported one or two errors and gave up, that was in the context that I
also wanted the compiler to be blindingly fast, either because it was
inherently fast, or maybe because it cheats using incremental techniques.
-John]
--

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