Improving Compiler Error Messages

[Ellery Newcomer]

On 05/03/2010 01:47 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> bearophile wrote:
>> Walter Bright:
>>
>>> This is characterized as "smart" parsing, but I have a less kind word
>>> for it - "hack"
>>
>> That feature is handy, computer languages are designed for humans first.
>> Python is now almost twenty years old (appeared in 1991) and in the
>> meantime that feature has not caused disasters :-)
>
> The problems may or may not be obvious to the user, but they can show up
> in buggy third party tools, and fewer third party tools, that must parse
> the source code, such as refactorers, IDEs, pretty printers, source code
> analyzers, etc.

Gratuitously ambiguous grammars produce the same effect, only more severely.