Re: [patch] initial location support for C parser

[Arnaud Charlet <charlet@adacore.com>]

> Here is a patch/RFC before I go any further.

Thanks for putting me in the loop BTW.

> My plan here is to make all the build* routines in the parser take a
> location, and fix everything else accordingly, eventually getting rid of
> input_location.  Arnaud and Manuel are tackling similar tasks, I hope we
> can work in tandem.

Indeed, this seems to go as a complementary (or possibly partly overlapping).
This means that I should probably start sending my patches soon as well.

Note that if people feel this is not a good time to commit such patches, maybe
we should consider starting a branch (just a thought).

> With this initial patch I noticed that to come up with suitable tests
> for all this, I would have to basically write an entire ISO C
> comformance test, something which is perhaps beyond the scope of my
> work.  I would like to fix existing tests as I go, and perhaps add new
> ones when it is obvious how to add new tests.  Sometimes I noticed it
> was incredibly hard to contrive a test for a particular location we were
> setting.  I hope we can come to a middle ground here-- I doubt I have
> the time, desire, or inclination to write an entire comformance suite.

Right.

Note that a better way to check line and column information may be to use some
kind of tree dump pass and check the result against e.g. a baseline.

For instance, I am working on generating relatively complete xref source
information, so using this xref dump could be a good basis for checking
line and column numbers generated by the front-ends in a pretty exhaustive
way.

Arno