On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 14:22:59 Meta via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> IMO the error message is not too bad once you understand what's going on (which probably means it's really not a good error message).

It's not that uncommon for me to see a question in D.Learn where someone is asking a question about an error message, and I have no idea why the error message isn't clear. After all, it's saying exactly what's wrong. It's just that it's saying it in compiler-speak, and when you know less about D or about the compiler, that tends to be less clear. As such, on some level, the more you know, the worse you're probably going to be at knowing when an error message is bad - which makes it all that more critical that folks report error messages that they think are bad and give suggestions on how they could be improved.

I know that I've fallen way short on that - in part, because I usually understand the error messages and don't spend time trying to figure out how they might be improved, and in part because even when I know that an error message is poor, I'm usually far more interested in fixing my code and getting on with life than spending the time to open a bug report. But more of us need to take the time to open those bug reports if we want the error messages to improve - or even better, take the time to open a PR to fix them, but that tends to take a much greater level of knowledge than is required to report the bad message, and most of us aren't compiler devs.

- Jonathan M Davis