> From: Peter Donald [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> >> >Your argument is that we should NOT provide additional
> information (the
> >> >task producing a particular piece of output) because that
> affects the
> >> >ability of some editors to parse the output.
> >>
> >> some editors ? All editors that provide this functionality
> would be closer
> >> to it ;)
> >
> >Maybe all editors that you use, but mine has no problems
> whatsoever. I
> >believe you can configure emacs to handle it too.
>
> Which editor to you use ? I actually have emacs setup to parse either
> format but the Vim/*Edit users are not so lucky - they have hardwired
> constraints ;)
I will now step into this fray with my Canadian $0.02 (currently, US $0.013). My comment concerns Peter's believe that Vim's error formats are hardwired. Peter, you should open up GVim/Vim 5.7 (the current defacto standard) and type ":h errorformat". This is a user modifiable error format template. Vim is just as configurable as Emacs when it comes to dealing with compilers.
Therefore, Vim can handle, very easily, the "[javac]" prefix from ant.
On the subject of error formats, please remember that each of the three compilers that ant uses all use different error formats. Look at the different output from javac1.2.2, javac1.3 and jikes. None of them use the exact same format. Heck, jikes is the only flexible one in that you can tell it to print the error formatting in two different ways. Therefore, I really think that this discussion is of relatively low priority, as the user can pass in the -emacs command line parameter to strip out the [javac] prefixes.
Jay (now $0.02 poorer)
