On Friday, 28 March 2014 at 08:25:05 UTC, Johannes Pfau wrote:
An idea stolen from C#:
How about adding a small 'error-message ID' like DPL00042 to
every
compiler message? This makes it easier to search for
information about
the error. If tools want to handle certain compiler errors then
they can grep for the message-ID instead of the complete
message.
I thought of adding a wiki page,
wiki.dlang.org/Compiler_Messages to
keep a list of all messages. It's then possible to add examples,
detailed information how to resolve an error and links to
further
information (e.g. changelog entry for error/warning/deprecated
message)
to that page.
I could file a pull request which does this for all existing
error
messages, but it requires contributors to follow a small
protocol
for future error messages as we need to make sure we do not
assign one
ID to different messages:
If you want to introduce a new error message:
Before even opening a pull request,
* go to wiki.dlang.org/Compiler_Messages
* pick next free ID
* add it to the page with status pending
* Once stuff is merged update the description/status on the
wiki page
As an example how this could work, search for CS1002.
So do we want this?
I'm a big fan of CXXXX and LNKXXXX from Visual C++ personally but
have never brought it up because I know Walter doesn't care for
them. The quality of error messages in D is a weakness in my
opinion though so anything to help with that is good in my book.
Thinking aloud here, maybe since DMD is switching to D instead of
managing IDs they could just be a short hash of the base error
message. Then a simple program could scan DMD's source and spot
them all and print out a list which could be compared to the wiki
list.
Something like this: http://dpaste.dzfl.pl/f552c718e935 (which
triggers a bug in DMD unfortunately and DMD couldn't use phobos
anyway).
