colostomy

[Moshe Zadka]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2000 dirckb at my-deja.com wrote:

> A long time ago I used a C compiler on the DEC
> VAX that would issue this warning message:
> "missing semi-colon, assumed."
> and Keep Compiling!

That's exactly! what Guido hates, and I agree. How do you think we got in
HTML hell? Precisely because browsers were trying to be helpful. TMTWODI
just means you have to learn more then one syntax to read code.

> It was pretty impressive, a compiler actually
> trying to be helpful.

The right thing for a compiler to do is to insert the semi-colon for the
*sole* purpose of finding more errors. However, putting error recovery in
a compiler tends to complexify it a lot.

--
Moshe Zadka <mzadka at geocities.com>. 
http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html
http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com