Some suggestions for improving error messages produced by Hugs
Runtime errors could be more informative than just stating
"Program error: <erroneous term>"
e.g.
No matching pattern
in definition of function: f
for argument: <arg>
Actually warnings at compile time about incomplete patterns would be
very helpful (however, I remember that Mark Jones mentions already in
his Gofer implementation documentation that this doesn't fit into
Gofer's design; the code generator doesn't produce messages).
The module structure should influence runtime error messages. Inside the
error message "Program error: <erroneous term>" only unqualified names
are used. This can be very confusing when the error occurs inside an
imported module, the top level module does not import some names of the
erroneous term, and possibly the names are even defined differently in
the top level module.
--
OLAF CHITIL, Lehrstuhl fuer Informatik II, RWTH Aachen, 52056 Aachen,
Germany
Tel: (+49/0)241/80-21212; Fax: (+49/0)241/8888-217
URL: http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~chitil/
