Unhelpful error messages

Peter Alexander peter.alexander.au at gmail.com
Mon Jul 8 12:47:46 PDT 2013


On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 18:10:45 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 07, 2013 at 02:06:46PM +0200, Peter Alexander wrote:
>> It's a tough situation and I think the only way this could even
>> reasonably be resolved is through some sophisticated IDE
>> integration. There is no way to display this kind of error 
>> report in
>> a blob of command line text.
>
> I don't see how an IDE could do better than the compiler. 
> Combinatorial
> explosion is a nasty problem, and if an IDE could solve it, so 
> could the
> compiler. Sure, the IDE could give you a nice scrollable GUI 
> widget to
> look through all the various reasons of the instantiation 
> failure, but
> fundamentally speaking, that's not much different from running 
> grep
> through 50 pages of compiler output. You still haven't solved 
> the root
> problem, which is to narrow down the exponential set of 
> possible problem
> causes to a manageable, human-comprehensible number.

I thinking of more of an interactive diagnostic: you choose which 
overload you intended to instantiate and then get a list of 
reasons why that failed to compile. Repeat recursively for any 
sub-calls.

Maybe the compiler could just spew out every possible error for 
every instantiation, and expect the user to grep, but that's not 
going to be a pleasant experience.


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