On Jun 9, 11 15:54, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Template error messages_do_  tend to be hideous. But that doesn't mean that
> normal errors are the best either. And as I said, templates often end up
> reporting exactly the same errors that you'd get if you wrote the code by
> hand, it's just that the errors are then in the template and generally harder
> to understand, because there's a good chance that it's not the code that you
> write.
>
> But regardless, none of these error messages are intended to be "read by the
> compiler." They're all intended to be read by humans. It's just that you don't
> find the choice of wording to be particularly understandable. However,
> everything that it's saying is correct. If you find particular error messages
> to be bad - particularly if you can think of better alternatives - then create
> enhancement requests for them in bugzilla. Then perhaps we'll get better error
> messages. But remember that the compiler doesn't know what you're trying to
> do. It only knows what you told it to do, so its messages tend to be targetted
> at telling you that what you're doing isn't working rather than telling you
> what you should be doing instead. So, error messages are often not that great
> simply because the compiler is not a mind-reader. Still, if you have
> suggestions for improvements to error messages, please submit them to bugzilla
> so that the error messages can be improved.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Actually, this is an old bug. http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3922