> The compiler would say “Missing semicolon on line 427.” To which I’d reply “If you know what is missing, and you know where it is missing, why not add it back yourself? You useless piece of crap!”
How can you add a feature like this without any extra complexity?
It sounds great in theory but in practice most code depend on another piece of code. Most of the time blindly changing one line can introduce more bugs.
"Expected a colon here, found a <" (ascii-art pointer to the place) "did you forget to close a bracket here?" (ascii-art pointer to 12 lines above that, where, indeed you forgot to close a bracket.
It does this for semi-colons (they are not always required), closing brackets (maybe you are nesting something horrendously deep?) etceteras.
The idea, basically is "I see this is wrong. But I'm not the one to decide how to fix it for you, but here's a suggestion".
I love Rust for this.
It was a complete nightmare trying to port code that compiled and ran perfectly well on the dept microvax when we all transitioned to Ultrix and Linux.
As a result of those months of pain, even thirty years later I’m a huge fan of strongly typed languages, compiling with -Wall and -Werror, and have a zero-warning policy.
If you’ve never gone through it, you wouldn’t understand...
1. Files are allowed to have different numbers of open & closed brackets. So who knows where the real error is? For all the compiler knows, you left that paren open deliberately in one file and forgot to include the paren-closing file?
2. C++ syntax generally lets you put anything anywhere -- the compiler doesn't seem to mind that I'm defining a new class literally inside the parentheses of a function call? Is that actually legal? Who knows. But I'm still a little confused... after opening that paren I almost immediately use too many closing braces -- why isn't that spotted immediately?
Using indentation for control flow was a bad decision, even if most modern IDEs now have good solutions for it.
Doing code formatting is fine; doing code formatting on lines from a checkout that I didn't change is bad. Yes, the file should be reformatted. But let me know before doing it, so I can make a formatting-only commit so it's easier to review when I put up the PR.