Re: Why C/C++ errors are SO obscure/devious??
- From: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Richard Tobin)
- Date: 31 Aug 2005 12:29:14 GMT
In article <IM%Qe.120733$fm.7885188@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Massimo Soricetti <massimo_main@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [wants a more helpful compiler]
There have been compilers like this, though I haven't seen one for C.
The most famous example was PLICC, the IBM PL/1 Checkout Compiler.
It would insert semicolons, guess at missing declarations, and so on.
It could take a FORTRAN program and "fix" it until it was a legal PL/1
program (not all FORTRAN programs of course, but sufficiently simple
ones).
It worked quite well for users who were writing simple programs and whose
errors were ones of the kind it could fix - simple syntax errors and the
like.
As I remember, experienced users didn't use it much, and those who did
didn't generally let it fix the errors itself.
There's no need for such a program to be a real compiler (that is, one
that generates code). It can be a checker that you run separately or
that some other compiler runs for you when there's an error. The
traditional C tool "lint" was a bit like this: it did't fix your
files, but it attempted to do more comprehensive checking of your code
than most compilers did.
-- Richard
.
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