Numbering compiler error messages?

[Walter Bright]

On 3/28/2014 2:37 AM, Andrea Fontana wrote:
> There's another advantage. If you want to change error message (or add
> localization like in visual c++) you still can found what the error means.

Completely worthless:

1. Programmers program in English. Yes, I've asked many international shops 
about this. They want error messages in English.

2. The internationalized messages are *terrible* because you need a person who 
is fluent in that language, and in compilers, to write them. That just doesn't 
work out too well in practice.

3. Every time you add/change an error message to the compiler, then you have to 
go back to (2) and try to deal with that. Never works, or you get crappy 
translations, meaning (1) the foreign programmers again prefer the English messages.

I.e. been there, done that. Translated messages are great for a lot of apps, but 
not for programming tools.


> It should be easier for IDE to parse and give suggestions or redirect to an help
> page to solve the problem.

The IDE doesn't have to parse them. All it has to do is do a substring search. 
The IDE developer would have to provide the patterns to search for, but that 
isn't any harder than creating an indexed table.