On Monday, 8 July 2013 at 18:10:45 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Sun, Jul 07, 2013 at 02:06:46PM +0200, Peter Alexander wrote:
It's a tough situation and I think the only way this could even
reasonably be resolved is through some sophisticated IDE
integration. There is no way to display this kind of error
report in
a blob of command line text.
I don't see how an IDE could do better than the compiler.
Combinatorial
explosion is a nasty problem, and if an IDE could solve it, so
could the
compiler. Sure, the IDE could give you a nice scrollable GUI
widget to
look through all the various reasons of the instantiation
failure, but
fundamentally speaking, that's not much different from running
grep
through 50 pages of compiler output. You still haven't solved
the root
problem, which is to narrow down the exponential set of
possible problem
causes to a manageable, human-comprehensible number.
I thinking of more of an interactive diagnostic: you choose which
overload you intended to instantiate and then get a list of
reasons why that failed to compile. Repeat recursively for any
sub-calls.
Maybe the compiler could just spew out every possible error for
every instantiation, and expect the user to grep, but that's not
going to be a pleasant experience.
