Re: [PATCH] caret diagnostics (was: broken FE diagnostics wrt complex expressions)

["Manuel López-Ibáñez" <lopezibanez@gmail.com>]

2008/8/14 Joseph S. Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>:
>
> But in any case the default should be the default with no configure
> option, users liking it should find their makefiles work the same
> everywhere and users not liking it can add the opposite option.

Then we are not going to get correct locations ever. New users do not
read the manual. Neither old users do. New functionality disabled by
default will be lost for both. I am fairly sure that a significant
percentage of GCC developers (not just users) do not know about
-fdiagnostics-show-option.

But even more importantly. No GCC developer is going to explicitly
enable caret diagnostics while developing GCC. How many nowadays use
-fshow-column or -fdiagnostics-show-option to check locations?

Moreover, caret diagnostics was mentioned as the way to solve the PRs
that Aldy mentioned. If it is disabled by default, how does it solve
anything? Why bother? I would really feel that I contributed to make
GCC worse if GCC diagnostics are less expressive because we have the
excuse of "you could enable the caret". I feel that a lot of PRs that
request for better diagnostics would be closed that way.

I feel that this thread is going again the same way as the ones
before. Someone says: Hey, having caret diagnostics would solve a lot
of problems! Everybody says: Yeah, that would be cool! We could do
this and that and all kinds of cool things. Then someone says: Oh yes
but we need to solve all these boring things that nobody ever really
looks and it should be disabled by default. Then one year later
someone says: Hey, having caret diagnostics would solve a lot of
problems!

Cheers,

Manuel.