From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2004-10-12T09:21:16+09:00
Subject: Re: quality of error messages

Austin Ziegler wrote:
>>
>>I think that you don't have to enforce any particular indentation style or
>>amount of space on each line - only that it is consistent between begin and
>>end.
> 
> No, no, no, and NO!

:) Are you still ticked off after your system crash?

[snip re tracers etc.]

> 
> This whole indentation-count idea is dumb.

I sympathize with both sides. Like you, I "flush left" my debug lines
(fighting vim to do so, and hating the idea of coding without being
able to do such).

I typically don't leave those in long, however. YMMV.

But the whole discussion here has nothing to do with enforcing a
coding style -- it's just a heuristic that would be invoked ONLY in
the case of a missing closing delimiter, and I hope ONLY when a
high level of warnings were turned on.

And by the way, an extra line of code or two could probably allow the
insertion of rogue left-justified lines. But that's beside the point.

The only goal discussed here afaik is: How could we get an error message
like:

    Probable missing 'end' line 123

instead of:

    Syntax error line 896

at end of file, hundreds of lines away from the error.


Hal