From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,67ca96c42837a9ca X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com Subject: Re: Getting GNAT to issue ARM error messages Date: 1999/02/09 Message-ID: <79oj1f$e8p$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 442177307 References: X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x1.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Tue Feb 09 06:02:27 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-02-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , davidp!nospam!@!nospam!syd.csa.com.au wrote: > Dear All, > > Can anybody tell me if/how it is possible to make the > GNAT Ada compiler issue references to the Ada Reference > Manual rather than, or in addition to, the regular error > messages issued by the compiler ? > I know that other Ada compilers such as Vertix and VADS > can do this Actually the latter are the wrong comparison points, since these are Ada 83 compilers, and in our view the situation with Ada 95 is quite different from Ada 83. We only give Ada 95 RM references in rare cases where they are actually helpful. In our experience, most of the time if a well thought out error message is not clear to a user, then they probably do not have the level of knowledge necessary to benefit from going to the reference manual. We prefer to work on making the error messages as clear as possible to someone who is NOT a language expert and NOT comfortable reading the reference manual. That is the goal. If there are very specific instances where you think an RM reference would be helpful, by all means point them out, but we definitely think that giving RM references on all error messages is useless and annoying: a := xyz; | xyz is undefined is about as clear as you can get, putting in an RM reference to the rather complicated section of the RM that talks about declaring entities and when they are visible is unlikely to help anyone! Generally people have found GNAT error messages to be very clear -- we certainly put a lot of effort into achieving this goal, and we know lots of people who have chosen GNAT for education and other uses of Ada because of its clear messages. We do NOT think that adding RM references would help in the goal of continued improvement of GNAT messages. This is actually an old thread, discussed before. One point here is that if you are used to an Ada 83 compiler, the comparison is a bit of an apples and oranges one, since the Ada 95 RM, in a (successful) attempt to be more precise is definitely much less accessible than the Ada 83 RM to a novice reader. -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own