Actually I'm just suggesting that the error message is ambiguous and I
that an error message that acknowledged the ambiguity would be useful.
... pretty simple change I would think ...
If one WERE writing a method using the | message selector, the existing
error messages make perfect sense. For everyone else making the mistake
of missing the message pattern, the additional information takes away
the confusion ...
Changing the error message for this case is all that I'm suggesting ....
and it is just a suggestion to make things easier for beginners who do
not have a Smalltalk compiler in the their heads ...
Dale
On 08/12/2016 03:36 PM, Nicolas Cellier wrote:
But the bar is a valid binary selector which takes a text parameter
| text
| text '|' expected ->
:= self requestPassword
You seem to suggest that the parser should use formatting,
presence/absence or spaces/newlines, but it never did so, it just
skips/ignores spaces.
The parser process as much as possible until the first error. It never
did a global analysis to find the minimal error. That's a far more
difficult problem.
Note that for the same kind of reason, while we could make ^ a binary
selector as I proposed once, we didn't yet by fear of interpreting
things differently in case of missing period:
self seeThePeriodMissingAtEndOfThisSentence
^self
2016-08-13 0:02 GMT+02:00 Dale Henrichs
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
On 08/12/2016 11:40 AM, Nicolai Hess wrote:
2016-08-12 20:30 GMT+02:00 Dale Henrichs
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
`'|' expected` is not the error message I would expect when
the message pattern is missing from a method and I try to
accept in browser:
| text |
text '|' expected ->:= self requestPassword
ifTrue: [ UIManager default requestPassword: self
prompt ]
ifFalse: [ UIManager default request: self prompt
initialAnswer: self template ].
^ (text isNil or: [ text isEmpty ])
ifTrue: [ nil ]
ifFalse: [ text ]
The highlighter was also confused turning red at the `->`
instead at the very beginning of the method ...
yeah, this is a funny one.
I onced debugged the parser to find out why that's happening. Can
you spot why this is a valid method :
| text |
| ^ text
:)
I cheated and used the syntax highlighting to give me subtle but
import clues :) Things I missed when initially trying to figure
out what I had done wrong ... perhaps an error message that
special cases this would be called for: "'|' expected or missing
message message pattern" ... There are at least two developers who
expected the syntax highlighter to do a better job ... and I sent
this thinking about newbies running into what I assume would be a
common mistake ...
Dale
