From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2004-10-08T12:29:47+09:00
Subject: Re: quality of error messages

On Friday, October 8, 2004, 10:14:56 AM, Brian wrote:

> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> In message "Re: quality of error messages"
>>     on Fri, 8 Oct 2004 05:28:55 +0900, Brian Schr�der
>> <ruby@brian-schroeder.de> writes:
>> 
>> |> % ./script.rb
>> |> script.rb:6: warning: inconsistent indentation level. 
>> |> script.rb:13: parse error
>> |> 
>> |> This should make it easy to find such errors.
>> 
>> |That seems like a nice idea to me. This would be nearly the same as the
>> |autoindenter so, only that it does not indent but spit out warnings.
>> 
>> I'm afraid that it might cause tab-space indentation war like in the
>> Python community.  The issue is much smaller though, since it is not
>> mandatory.
>> 
>> 							matz.
>> 
> Therefore I like the idea of using a high warning level or a seperate
> program for this task. By now I normally
>   - mark everything
>   - M-x indent-region
>   - Look where something is weird.

The unfortunate thing about this is that editor-based indenters never
seem to work perfectly.  e.g. what to do with here-docs?  Ruby is a
difficult language to indent.  Consequently I tend to use the feature
locally, not on the whole file.

> If a program could guide where I look that would be nice. Therefore also
> an external program or an xemacs plugin would be nice to me.

An external program would be terrific, just becuase it could be used
independently, and also in any editor.

Gavin