in reply to Grokking Compile Error Messages

Interestingly, this is one of those cases where turning on warnings obscured the real error. Maybe it would have helped if Perl printed warnings in yellow and errors in red. (Or otherwise distinguished fatal errors from warnings...)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Grokking Compile Error Messages
by hardburn (Abbot) on Jul 21, 2004 at 16:36 UTC

    As soon as you do colored error messages, you'll get complaints from people on *nix systems that haven't been updated in 15 years about the weird output.

    Perhaps make it an option when you compile perl?

    ----
    send money to your kernel via the boot loader.. This and more wisdom available from Markov Hardburn.

[reply]
      Perhaps make it an option when you compile perl?
      No, because on *nix, the sysadmin then has the unenviable position of annoying half of the people. And if you've ever been the sysadmin for a thousand users, someone will complain that the system wide time is off by 0.03 nanoseconds, never mind that Perl is giving them wonky characters in the error messages.

      Make it an environment option, or a command line option. And make it off by default.

      -QM
      --
      Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

[reply]
Re^2: Grokking Compile Error Messages
by ambrus (Abbot) on Jul 21, 2004 at 22:20 UTC

    Go on, write a module that gives you colored error messages by setting $SIG{__DIE__} and $SIG{__WARN__}. Just don't make it default.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      You're all missing the point. My comment had almost nothing to do with a desire for colored error messages, and almost everything to do with designing a language compiler that won't confuse people by default, however that is to be accomplished. The basic underlying problem is that the messages are prioritized in a deceptive manner. An optional module does nothing to fix that.
[reply]
        Sometimes you wish there was more than one ++ to give. :-)
[reply]

In Section Meditations