------- Comment #4 from igodard at pacbell dot net 2007-08-29 02:27 ------- OK, I see. I doubt I'm the only one who is confused by the report of a mis-used obscure gcc-only "feature" instead of an all-too-common parenthesis error :-) However, if you are emitting diagnostics on the fly then you have little choice but accept the last valid parse, which exposes you to trouble when the user has excess closers.
In the compilers I've done we didn't do the diagnostics on the fly, but the diagnostic emitter backed up the parse to previous levels of the bracket tree and reparsed omitting either the opener or the last preceding closer at each level. We took the parse that got farthest, reporting a "probably" excess or missing bracket at the point where it did (or did not) appear. This avoided nearly all of the cascaded errors that gcc produces. Of course, that was in the days when a recompile was half an hour not 20 seconds, and getting the compiler as far as you could was a big help to the programmer :-) -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33176
