Re: [Caml-list] modified error messages for ocamlc

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

One use case would be supporting other editors in an easier way. I
just tried OCaml with Geany, and apparently the people that wrote
Geany's OCaml mode didn't bother with a custom error regexp parser. If
we had a command-line option to the compiler to produce gnu-standard
error messages, that would be a non-issue.

I think a patch affecting the error and warning-printing functions of
the Location module (parsing/location.ml) should be a very satisfying
first step (what kind of errors are you thinking about that aren't
handled by these functions?). I'm considering writing such a patch.

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 6:40 PM, William Smith <bills@emu-bark.com> wrote:
>> File "multilineError.ml", line 2, character 0-line 4, character 1:
>
>> This added info is great, but if you change the format, then please take
>> advantage of this opportunity to make use a more standard format so that
>> other tools can recognize those messages without extra work.
>
>> E.g:
>
>> multilineError.ml:2.0-4.1: Warning 8: this pattern-matching is not
>> exhaustive.
>
>
>>        Stefan
>
> This is harder than it looks because there are about a dozen places in the
> code where OCaml creates error messages.  They're spread out amongst all of
> the tools.
>
> I believe I found them all, but each one requires careful work to avoid
> breaking things.   So far, I've only changed the one in ocamlc.  After
> finding them, I'll also need to learn how to trigger each of them to even
> test the change.
>
> That's why I don't want to do it unless it's really useful to people.
>
> I don't use emacs right now so I don't know how to test that part of the
> system.  Will using the standard Gnu error format be ok with what Daniel
> Bünzli was concerned about?
>
> Bill
>