Re: [PATCH] Re: named references

[Joel E. Denny]

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Akim Demaille wrote:

> > I will think about other name. By the way, would you
> > like to fix something in the formulation of errors in my previous mail ? Are
> > braces "( .. )" in secondary message appropriate ?
> 
> I don't have this mail here, but I remember I didn't like too much the parens.
> I prefer that to use indentation in the following lines to give additional
> details.  Something like
> 
> 1.1-9: type mismatch
>   left operand type: int
>   right operand type: string

Whatever we do, I think we ought to be consistent with other multiline 
Bison error messages.  Parentheses are not.

> But we can discuss this later.

I agree.

> The first one, and to my eyes by far the most important (even though it's just
> a matter of taste and the second point is actually more pragmatic), it goes
> against years of training in shell, Perl etc.  I conjecture that the eyes of
> most programmers (at least those from the Unix world) give a higher precedence
> to $ than to ".".
> 
> And second, this is more robust to changes.  $stmt.list means $[stmt].list,
> whatever the context, while with your implementation, depending on the rule,
> it may change, depending on the names introduced.  Worse yet, a single action
> might see it's meaning change because of changes in the rule itself.

Good points.