On 9/24/2013 2:23 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 September 2013 at 20:26:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 9/23/2013 10:33 AM, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>>> GCC has a carat too now.
>>
>> DMC has had a carat for 30 years now.
>>
>>   int x x;
>>         ^
>>   test2.c(2) : Error: missing ',' between declaration of 'x' and 'x'
>>
>> Nobody ever gave a damn about that feature, i.e. not one single person
>> commented on it, including not a single D user.
>
> Maybe that's because "not one single person" actually uses DMC? ;)

yes, I've had a fantasy business for the last 30 years.

On 9/24/2013 2:56 PM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> It seems nobody comments on almost anything DMC-related anyway. Isn't
> this the DMC newsgroup: http://forum.dlang.org/group/c++ ? If it is,
> there's hardly a single post per month..

You overlook that it's a very old compiler - 30 years. In its day it had maybe 100,000 users.

People do still use it today, to compile dmd for Win32 for example, and nobody has yet

     EVER

commented on that feature, unless I prompted them, when

I have pointed it out many times over the decades, and the response is always:

    SO WHAT

    WHO CARES

etc. So please forgive my grumpiness about if clang implements it, suddenly it's the greatest, most useful feature ever.

On 9/24/2013 3:27 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> You have used lack of comments as an indicator of quality in the past.

Lack of comments does mean something.

BTW, as I wrote in another post here, I've prompted people about it, due to the silence. Read there what their response was.

On 9/24/2013 3:04 PM, bearophile wrote:
> The problem with grepping is that it could lead to mistakes, you have to grep
> for the whole error message, otherwise you risk finding the wrong message.

It's hardly a risk. If you get 2 hits, you skip the one that's a mismatch.


> Another problem is that the wording could change, both in different versions of
> the same compiler and in different compilers, so every compiler needs its own
> wiki.

That problem is MUCH WORSE with error numbers. Remember, I have tried it in the past.


> Also, if you need to use a search, you must have all the error messages in
> the same page, while with error messages you could just go directly to the page
> number and you don't need to copy and paste several (all) the words of the error
> message. Having a standard number across all D compilers allows for a
> standardization of tools (the IDE has to show the same error tooltips regardless
> the D compiler you are using). Another advantage of numbers of error messages is
> that if two different points of the same compiler have to generate the same
> error, using the same code number there is no risk the error message could go
> out of sync to each other. This has happened in DMD, where I have seen the same
> error give different error messages with the same dmd
> (http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11094 ).

Standardization of error messages, let alone standardization of error message numbers, is a very bad idea. It presumes all implementations are identical, and hamstrings attempts at innovation.


>> What makes me grumpy is people only want these things when some other
>> compiler does it, sort of a bandwagon thing.
>
> I have tried to show, here and in Issue 5004, that's not true.

I don't believe it, based on plenty of experience with "grass is greener" compiler ephemera.

On 9/24/2013 4:17 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> So please forgive my grumpiness about if clang implements it, suddenly it's
> the greatest, most useful feature ever.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not automatically against anything that clang does. The spell-checking on undefined symbols is a nice idea, and we've now got our own version of it in dmd (and in dmc!).

On 9/24/13 1:29 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/23/2013 11:38 AM, bearophile wrote:
>> 2) The other improvement I'd like for D error messages and warnings is to give a
>> standard error number. This is a simple improvement, but it makes simpler to
>> write explanation pages for the errors. The C# compiler and other compilers have
>> them.
>
> I used to do that, but again, it was a completely unwanted feature, and I abandoned it.
>
> It's simple enough to grep for the error message text, and I myself prefer to do the grep method.
>
> What makes me grumpy is people only want these things when some other compiler does it, sort of a
> bandwagon thing.

I think it's less a bandwagon thing and more a the bar has been raised thing.  30 years ago ide's were essentially unheard of.  Tooling around compilers and languages was almost non-existent.  The picture and expectations about user friendliness today are drastically different.  The past is not a perfect predictor of the present.

On Tuesday, 24 September 2013 at 23:19:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/24/2013 3:27 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> You have used lack of comments as an indicator of quality in the past.
>
> Lack of comments does mean something.
>
> BTW, as I wrote in another post here, I've prompted people about it, due to the silence. Read there what their response was.

You may underestimate power of marketing in IT world :) It does not matter how useful feature was on its own - clang guys has convinced the crowd it is useful so now it is useful. Its actual merit is irrelevant unless you want to invest into "counter-propaganda".

On 9/24/2013 4:38 PM, Brad Roberts wrote:
> I think it's less a bandwagon thing and more a the bar has been raised thing.
> 30 years ago ide's were essentially unheard of.  Tooling around compilers and
> languages was almost non-existent.  The picture and expectations about user
> friendliness today are drastically different.  The past is not a perfect
> predictor of the present.

Borland pretty much invented the modern IDE back in the 80's, and before then Emacs served as an IDE (it was able to parse compiler output and display the location of errors and the associated messages).

Besides, the ^ thing was for those who didn't use IDEs, not for people who do.

I'd have a different attitude about it if just one person had ever said "cool" when I showed them that feature, and even in the (several) times this has come up before in this ng, and I point out that dmc does it, the reaction seems to be faint annoyance that dmc did it decades before clang :-)

grump grump grump

BTW, I don't really recall if dmc invented the feature or if I'd seen it before on some other compiler. Too long ago.

On 9/24/2013 4:43 PM, Dicebot wrote:
> You may underestimate power of marketing in IT world :)

i.e. compiler fashion!

> It does not matter how
> useful feature was on its own - clang guys has convinced the crowd it is useful
> so now it is useful. Its actual merit is irrelevant unless you want to invest
> into "counter-propaganda".

Probably the most insightful comment in this thread.

Walter Bright:

> I don't believe it, based on plenty of experience with "grass is greener" compiler ephemera.

Thank you for your answers Walter.

(In this thread we are discussing three possible improvements for error messages, but of the three the only one I have asked in Bugzilla is Issue 5004, because it's the only one I am kinda sure it's an improvement for me).

Bye,
bearophile