Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!brl-tgr!ron From: ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: Unknown what? Message-ID: <7361@brl-tgr.ARPA> Date: Tue, 15-Jan-85 15:45:04 EST Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.7361 Posted: Tue Jan 15 15:45:04 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 18-Jan-85 03:27:12 EST References: <189@wuphys.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: Ballistic Research Lab Lines: 23 > Last night I compiled a program on my 2.9BSD system that still had > some typos in it. One particularly interesting error message was > > Unknown keyword > > Not only does that not the describe the problem (a missing }) but that > doesn't make sense for any problem. I don't know what the standards > committee has to say about error messages, but perhaps we need a line > in the standard prohibiting oxymorons. :-) > Some compilers are trying to address the error message problem (like Tartan claims to be attempting if they ever get it working). For an interesting reference in the Journal of Software Theory and Practice there wsa a paper (about three years ago) called "My compiler gives good error messages -- or does it?" They took a Pascal program and introduced a trivial typo-style bug into it to see what message various compilers gave. Their last example was nominated for a special award, it looked like write(tty, foo); ^ Missing Semicolon =Ron