D2 is really that stable as it is claimed to be?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, September 22, 2013 16:50:05 Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 9/22/13, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote:
> > Except that most of us don't care about the column number. It's of
> > marginal
> > benefit at best, and it harms compilation speed, so it's not worth it
> > IMHO.
> 
> You've never ran into lexer errors before have you?
> 
> test.d(10): Error: found ',' when expecting ')'
> 
> Now good luck finding where you forgot to put a closing brace in a
> statement that uses traits or is(typeof( checks, such as this:
> 
> static assert(0, format("%s does not implement '%s'",
> __traits(identifier, typeof(this))), __FUNCTION__);
> 
> It should have been:
> 
> static assert(0, format("%s does not implement '%s'",
> __traits(identifier, typeof(this)), __FUNCTION__));
> 
> That's just a trivial case though.
> 
> I run into these all the time, and I have to spend half a minute
> scanning left and right trying to figure out where the damn missing
> brace went. Marginal benefit my ass.

Except that because the compiler doesn't know where the terminator should have 
been, it can't give you a column number anyway. In that case, it can't even 
give you the correct line number. At best, it can tell you the line number 
where the unmatched symbol was, and that's often not helpful (especially with 
braces). And even with parens, because the compiler doesn't know what you 
actually meant to do, it's not like it can tell you where exactly in the 
expression or statement you need to fix your code anyway. I really don't think 
that a column number would help much here.

- Jonathan M Davis