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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: renaming Interfaces.Java.Ada_To_Java_String to the + operator
Date: 1998/01/20
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Date: 1998-01-20T00:00:00+00:00
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<<is syntactically illegal, without looking it up (and without feeding it
to a compiler)?  GNAT complains "missing operand" pointing to the second
plus, which isn't the most helpful error message I've ever seen.
Rational's compiler complains about a missing expression before the
second plus, which is no better.
>>

[This was for the illegal use of unary plus and minus as in

   x & + b

it is always hard to know what might be the "most helpful" message, since
of course this involves telephathy. I wonder if we changed this to
"unary plus[minus] requires parenthesization in this context"

or somesuch, would this be an overall improvement, maybe, it is a tossup.
The problem is that one or the other is correct but it is hard to tell
which.

Yes, if you got fancy you could use type information to tell, but that's
reallyu *awfully* heavy in implementation complexity.