bertrand@eiffel.UUCP (Bertrand Meyer) (07/07/90)
We are interested in improving the quality of syntactical error messages produced by Interactive's Eiffel compiler (es and ec commands). If you have any examples of actual errors for which you were not entirely happy with the compiler's reaction, we would appreciate if you could send us a copy. Please include a sample erroneous class text which gives rise to the message, the message itself, and any other appropriate comments (e.g. why you feel the message was not the right one, if that is not obvious). An important note: We are interested in cases of *actual* errors; this is not an exercise to ``break the compiler''. Given any compiler, it is easy to contrive erroneous programs that will produce lots of apparently strange messages. Our goal is to make sure that the compiler reacts appropriately to the kinds of error that people actually make in practice. Please mail examples or any other comment on this topic not directly to the undersigned but to the mailing list eiffel@eiffel.com which he reads anyway. -- -- Bertrand Meyer bertrand@eiffel.com