From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2006-08-19T00:10:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Syntax checker wtf?

Daniel Martin wrote:
> Robert Klemme <shortcutter@googlemail.com> writes:
> 
>> I *think* this is at least partly due to Ruby's convenient and very
>> flexible syntax.  IOW, the parser has no means to detect the error
>> line as it could be in several places - likely too many to report.
>> Also, this is how parsers work.  From my limited insight into the
>> parser generation business it would require a) a different parser
>> generator that is much smarter or b) a lot of effort that it's not
>> worth IMHO.
> 
> I'll note that perl has a similarly flexible syntax,

I don't think so.  For example, you must terminate statements with a ";" 
  (or did that change in the latest version?) and you cannot omit 
parentheses.  That makes up for a significant difference in flexibility 
of the two languages.

> yet I don't hear
> people new to perl complaining about this.  Perhaps this is because
> perl has more to complain about, from a newbie perspective, but I
> think it's also because perl gives better syntax error messages.  For
> example, if you get a runaway unclosed string or regexp (//) operator,
> the perl interpreter will, in the syntax error, also say something
> like "possible runaway string beginning line NN".

I know that perl does this and I liked that at the time when I used 
perl.  But:

> This seems to me like it would be a simple addition to the ruby
> parser, to mention the line number of the thing it's trying to close
> when expecting tEND, or ']', or some other nested thing that can go
> off the end of the file.

IMHO you're greatly underestimating the effor.  I guess even for perl it 
was not "a simple addition" - and from what I can see a lot more efforts 
were put into perl vs. ruby.

Kind regards

	robert