Re: Visibility and error messages (in named refs).

[Joel E. Denny]

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009, Akim Demaille wrote:

> > Based on your previous email, that's why I'm also now
> > suggesting that a misleading reference always be just a warning.  Bison is
> > just telling the user that something *may* be wrong.  I think it's
> > confusing and not helpful to the user if Bison makes it an error only in
> > some subcases.  I also do not think we should drop the "hidden" warnings.
> > 
> > Maybe Akim can give his opinions on both of these issues too.

> So it is my religion that when you are totally free, because you're designing
> a new feature and you have no standard or backward compatibility to obey to,
> warnings should be errors.  It helps programmers converge to a single form of
> writing, and therefore it helps escaping for local dialects (I think that the
> Perl motto TIMTOWTDI is wrong).

I usually agree with that philosophy.  And, at some point in this 
discussion, I felt that the phrase "misleading reference" softened the 
error status enough to avoid the potential for confusion that Alex raised, 
but he persuaded me otherwise with his example.  Now I'm back on the fence 
as to which way is truly right.

On one hand, errors can be converted to warnings more easily than warnings 
can be converted to errors, so that argues for errors in 2.5.  On the 
other hand, whatever decision we make, the feature will be experimental in 
2.5, so we could change our minds in the next version if we really wanted 
to.