Improving Compiler Error Messages

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:hrmvag$ea5$1 at digitalmars.com...
> BCS wrote:
>> People cite typing speed, but who here is actually limited by that? 
>> Everyone I can think of spends WAY more time thinking than typing. If you 
>> are limited by your typing speed then ether you type VERY slow (a one 
>> fingered typist) or you are already way more productive than anyone I've 
>> ever met.
>
> ; is not even a shift character. Talking about typing speed with it 
> suggests one also has a speed problem with the . at the end of a sentence.
>
> In any case, in 8th grade during the summer once I was bored and decided 
> to take a local typing class. It was 2 weeks, an hour a day, and we 
> learned on old mechanical typewriters where you really needed to hammer 
> the keys.
>
> Given all the keyboarding I've done since, it's probably the most 
> productive class I've ever taken :-) It makes me cringe watching people 
> type with 2 fingers at high speed.

I've taken at least a couple keyboarding classes (they seem to be a fairly 
standard requirement at the high-school/junior-high level these days...or at 
least in the Cleveland area anyway...or at least they were 10-15 years ago, 
maybe it's changed since...). I passed the classes fine, but I never got to 
a point where I really felt comfortable with it. Especialy for C-style code, 
where the usual statistics for most/least-commonly-used characters go right 
out the window and you spend about as much time streching for a shifted 
punctuation and various keyboard shortcuts as you spend on the "home keys". 
But I've been able to get up to about 30 or so words per minute with the 
ad-hoc style I've been developing since I was about 7, and that's been more 
than fast enough for any coding or normal writing I've ever done. I spend 
more time than that just thinking about what I'm going to write, and it's 
not like I do any dictation. That's my experience, anyway :).

I'm also another person that finds semicolons magically appearing at the end 
of statements...even when I use a language that doesn't allow them ;)