Re: ORCA/C is a horrible compiler

[unknown@apple.com (Matt Ackeret)]

In article <1993Jun5.052751.8094@actrix.gen.nz> dempson@swell.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson) writes:
>In article <1uotd0$qsi@altitude.HIP.CAM.ORG> vandry@CAM.ORG (Phillip Vandry) writes:
>News to me.  Anything like a syntax error tends to cause a vast number
>of error messages to be generated.

Yeah, and I actually have had the compiler give me better error messages
than I have expected.  Not usually, but it's happened.

To Philip: In addition to the things I said in e-mail, disregard all but the
first error message if it spits out a million at you.  Then fix the error
and recompile.  The biggest complaint that I have is that the error message
often scrolls off the top of the screen and thus I have to recomiple to find
out what the error message is/was.  Something like "scrollback" would be
oh-so useful. That would be a useful addition to GNO.. sure it's a weird 
concept, but let the user define a set amount of memory to use for this, and
then you can scroll through that amount of standard output.

You could also _always_ redirect standard out and standard error, but that's
a pain. (Is there even a "tee" in GNO?)

>> Maybe there is a verbose flag? Maybe there is a bug? Or maybe there is 2.0.1?
>> In any case 2.0 is useless...
>There is a "progress" option, which is on by default.  +p enables
>progress information, -p disables it.

I also mentioned #pragma lint  in e-mail.  It's annoying to some degree
but once you've updated all of your prototypes, then adding new code will
be less painful. (In other words, when you first turn #pragma lint on, it's
likely it'll find a bunch of errors)
-- 
unknown@apple.com		Apple II Forever
unknown@ucscb.ucsc.edu  These opinions are mine, not Apple's.