On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 11:08 PM, Brent Spillner <spillner@acm.org> wrote:
Yes, it's possible to wade through the error messages and figure out what went wrong. And Qi is clearly trying to help out with traceable assertions; that may well be the best we can do. But no reasonable person would claim that hundreds of lines of error message, mostly filled with types that the user never directly constructed, are the most desirable way to report a simple syntax error. This problem is endemic to all ET libraries and compilers, and it would be very, very hard to do much better. Again, though, I think you're underselling this as a barrier to entry. How many people would ever learn C++ if all libraries did this?
The "unintelligible" error messages are *not* the fault of the library. The *compiler* spews out these error messages. There's nothing you can do in C++ code to tell the compiler to "output exactly this message if you find an error here" -- sure with C++11 you can use static_assert but you can't control what the compiler will print (unless you're writing the compiler). Seriously, I don't know why people are blaming the libraries when the compilers are the ones generating these error messages. Am I missing something here?
Now having said that, and before I leave this thread, let me remind everyone that **you can also have statement syntax in Phoenix** if you have a complex statement and you fear writing complex phoenix lambda expressions. It's called phoenix::functions.
The important issue here isn't just statement /syntax/, it's that we have options available that don't turn what looks like an ordinary C++ statement into a massive AST with its own mini-compiler behind the scenes.
You're right. In this case, it's called functions -- normal namespace or class scope functions. They work perfectly fine. I still don't get it. Am I missing anything here? Cheers -- Dean Michael Berris http://goo.gl/CKCJX