Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

>> C30 is like this as well. It knows there is a syntax error in that it
>> has reached something without finding a closing bracket, why does it
>> need to use a catch-all error message??? 
> 
> - because the C syntax is so 'dense' that in most cases there is more 
> than one possible correct continuation (and probably at more than one 
> point in the line)
> - because in the presence of macro's it makes no sense to indicate the 
> position in the line which caused the error
> - because of the above most C parser (scanner/tokenizer/lexer) are 
> bottom-up parsers, optimized for speed, not for accurate error reporting
> - most C compilers seem to think it is more important to continue 
> compiling in order to report more errors than to report errors accurately

FWIW, the error messages of the C++ compilers I generally work with
point right to the problematic line (or the following line). And when
not, the message is specific enough to easily find the line. VC++ for
example also can be configured to break on first error.

After writing a few days' worth of code and recompiling, I generally get
a few syntax errors. These are pretty much really quick fixes; not much
thinking involved, due to the good locality and appropriate content of
the messages.

Gerhard
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