This and other RFCs are available on the web at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/ =head1 TITLE Emit warnings and errors based on unoptimized code =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Nathan Torkington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sep 12 2000 Last Modified: Sep 15 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 214 Version: 2 Status: Developing =head1 ABSTRACT When code triggers warnings or errors, those warnings or errors should report the code that caused them. If the code has been rewritten or altered by the optimizer, the unoptimized code should be be what's cited in the text of the warning or error message. =head1 CHANGES * Added "except where it's impossible" clause =head1 DESCRIPTION In perl5 it's easy to get warnings about code you didn't write (this is from perl5.6.0, but similar problems with "use" turning into a "BEGIN" block have been present in Perl for a long time): print "what's that, $perl?"; Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at -e line 1. Perl has rewritten the double-quoted string as "what's that, " . $perl . "?" and when the uninitialized value warning is generated, Perl reports it as coming from the concatenation operation. This is misleading and confuses users. When Perl needs to report errors or warnings, it should describe the code the programmer wrote, regardless of how that's been translated within Perl. The only exception to this is when an optimization results in the irrecoverable loss of this information. Such optimizations should be weighed on their individual merits, taking into account the potential confusion they could cause. Where possible, warnings and errors should report useful location information to the user. =head1 IMPLEMENTATION Each op could keep track of the name of the construct that it came from. Instead of reporting errors in terms of ops, report errors in terms of source-level constructs. This may bloat the op tree/bytecode. There could be an option to strip these debugging symbols from the bytecode, much as strip(1) works on Unix, if this overhead is not welcome. perl526 will not be able to successfully translate any code that relies on parsing warnings or error messages. =head1 REFERENCES perldiag manpage for Perl's error messages and warnings
