Re: [PATCH] Re: named references

[Alex Rozenman]

Hi,

Joel E. Denny <address@hidden> wrote:

> So there are 2 categories of submessages: "refers to" or "possibly meant".
> Anything in "refers to" is the correct interpretation of a reference.
> Anything in "possibly meant" is an incorrect interpretation: bad
> bracketing, hidden/renamed, or out of scope in the case of mid-rules.
> Bracketing and symbol number are always shown in a submessage as above.
> If the type of incorrect interpretation is not bad bracketing, a word is
> added to indicate the type (like "hidden" in above example).
> There are 3 categories of errors:
> 1. "undefined reference": There are no "refers to" submessages, but there
> may be some "possibly meant" submessages.
> 2. "ambiguous reference": There is more than one "refers to" submessage,
> and there may be some "possibly meant" submessages.
> 3. "misleading reference": There is exactly one "refers to" submessage,
> and there is at least one "possibly meant" submessage.
>
Very good clarification. I agree.

On Wed, 18 Mar 2009, Akim Demaille wrote:

> 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.
>
The second point is good. It could seem better to check all the declared
symbols but it will be ridiculous when adding a new symbol will raise errors
in many various unrelated places.

I will try to integrate all the proposals from this thread. Thank you.

-- 
Best regards,
Alex Rozenman (address@hidden).