From: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: The 'usage: ...' message. (Was: On Bloat...)
Date: Mon, 20 May 2024 06:42:09 +1000 (EST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2405200632070.15285@aneurin.horsfall.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKH6PiVSU4o5twt8EXZO6FAKdxMu19SOWLEyYRVa0yBM3BXAUA@mail.gmail.com>
On Sun, 19 May 2024, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> Another non-descriptive style of error message that I admired was that
> of Berkeley Pascal's syntax diagnostics. When the LR parser could not
> proceed, it reported where, and automatically provided a sample token
> that would allow the parsing to progress. I found this uniform
> convention to be at least as informative as distinct hand-crafted
> messages, which almost by definition can't foresee every contingency.
> Alas, this elegant scheme seems not to have inspired imitators.
I did something like that for our compiler-writing assignment. An
ALGOL-like language (I think I used ALGOLW) it would detect when a
semicolon was missing, and insert it (with a warning). As a test case, it
successfully compiled a program with no semicolons at all...
-- Dave
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2024-05-19 20:42 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2024-05-19 14:03 [TUHS] " Douglas McIlroy
2024-05-19 16:18 ` [TUHS] " Paul Winalski
2024-05-19 16:21 ` Paul Winalski
2024-05-19 17:22 ` [TUHS] Re: The 'usage: ...' message Ralph Corderoy
2024-05-19 20:42 ` Dave Horsfall [this message]
2024-05-19 23:08 [TUHS] The 'usage: ...' message. (Was: On Bloat...) Douglas McIlroy
2024-05-20 0:58 ` [TUHS] " Rob Pike
2024-05-20 3:19 ` arnold
2024-05-20 3:43 ` Warner Losh
2024-05-20 4:46 ` arnold
2024-05-20 3:54 ` Bakul Shah via TUHS
2024-05-20 14:23 ` Clem Cole
2024-05-20 17:30 ` Greg A. Woods
2024-05-20 20:10 ` John Levine
2024-05-21 1:14 ` John Cowan
2024-05-20 17:40 ` Stuff Received
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.2405200632070.15285@aneurin.horsfall.org \
--to=dave@horsfall.org \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).