An example of Clang error messages

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:

> Here's what DMC does:
> 
>      x = (a + b) * (c + d) / (e + f);
>                          ^
> test.cpp(6) : Error: illegal operand types
> Had: Foo
> and: int
> 
> and here's what DMD does:
> 
> test.d(6): Error: incompatible types for ((c) + (d)): 'Foo' and 'int'

[What DMD currently does (plus the last thing you have very quickly implemented, I have asked for that feature of Mathematica lot of time ago) is enough for me.]

For a human those two error messages give about the same information. But for a IDE that has to parse the error messages to show something graphically the error message with the "^" can be better.

Regarding the excessive amount of lines of error messages shown on the command line when you use the "^", with DMD I usually only read the first error message or the few first ones, ignoring the successive error messages, because the successive ones are usually useless. With GCC I sometimes use a compilation flag (-Wfatal-errors) that when present makes the compiler show only the first of few first error messages.

Bye,
bearophile