Re: Why C/C++ errors are SO obscure/devious??

Massimo Soricetti wrote:
I'm not a C newbie, but I'm teaching C programming (well... FIRST programming and then C) to other guys these days and it's driving me to some reflexions on the language.

It's not uncommon to forget a } writing code, and at compiling time get an error 18956778 lines after the mistake, in an otherwise absolutely correct piece of code. Or, sometimes in my journeys I got errors reported in a file, checked and found it correct, and discovered it was caused by an error in another file. And in general, I noted that many, if not all, error messages from the compiler are VERY short and cryptic, while a couple of words more could sometimes help a lot in understanding what's wrong and where, for newbies. Well, not only for them... maybe a compiler switch --NOOB_ERR_MSGS could be very handy for some people :o)
....
What are your opinions on this matter?

The preprocessor is the source of all evil when it comes to locating compilation errors.

August
.

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