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: 103376,3d6ef988ec3a5ef7
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: renaming Interfaces.Java.Ada_To_Java_String to the + operator
Date: 1998/01/22
Message-ID: <dewar.885449767@merv>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 318246287
References: <01bd1e34$1632c2c0$24326489@Westley-PC.calspan.com>
 <dewar.884489205@merv> <mheaney-ya023680001001982248520001@news.ni.net>
 <34bba5a1.224459@SantaClara01.news.InterNex.Net> <En3Cxz.7HD@world.std.com>
 <dewar.885328875@merv>
X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.nyu.edu
X-Trace: news.nyu.edu 885450001 19984 (None) 128.122.140.58
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-01-22T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


I asked:

<<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.
>>



But was disappointed to get almost no response (Stephe thanks!) The one
response suggests giving both messages, but I think it is better generally
to choose just one. The trouble with giving two is that then you are
absolutely SURE you have generated at least one junk message, which seems
unforutnate.

But I really would like some more input on this (surely we still have
*some* Ada folks around the newsgroup, and not just cross-posting
trollers :-)

It is really useful to have lots of input on error message things, since
they are so subjective.