I have had an idea for a small and simple addition to Lua that I
thought I
would share with the list. I think Lua's error messages should each
have a
unique identifying number that is printed out along with the message.
The
messages should also be listed in the Lua manual in numerical order of
their ID numbers.
- I think the Lua manual or man page says somewhere that "error
messages
are self explanatory".
Hehe. Actually, the semantics of a programming language
are often best understood in terms of what is not allowed,
certainly I learned a lot of PL/1 by reading the manual
of errors. So this is probably a good idea to reinforce
the semantic specification. In fact I should do this
for my own language translator.
BTW: the 'translate to French' idea is nice but
often things are harder because messages aren't
just a phrase, but a polymorphic phrase -- one
with holes that get filled in. (EG "xxx is undefined
in function yyy"). Different languages might order
the insertions differently due to grammar differences :(
--
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net
