re. a minor but annoying bug

re. a minor but annoying bug

[Byron Rakitzis]

Well, the reason for the bug is that rc does not annotate the
parse-tree with line numbers the way a C compiler might. The error
printer makes a stab at what the line number is, by printing the number
of newlines read so far. (This trick works ok for syntax errors.)

Therefore, an error raised anywhere inside a while loop will print the
line number of the close-brace of the while loop.

I realize this is ugly, but a fix for this problem is more effort than
I can or want to put into rc right now.

Re: re. a minor but annoying bug

[Alan Watson]

I think this is the kind of `yes, it's ugly, but I've got better things
to do' problem for which the BUGS section of the manual page was
designed.

Alternatively, only print a line number for syntax errors, on the
grounds that no information is better than false information.

rc does better than another scripting language I use regularly (cl in
IRAF -- an astronomical data mangling package), which always reports an
error as occuring on the line AFTER the last line in a file.

Alan.