Nonsensical error message when omitting 'of'

[Chasm]

The following code produced this error message "The method "method" is expecting 1 argument, but no arguments are being supplied in this call. The declaration is "method(argument as T)"". I would expect an error like "Incorrect type specified "method<int>". Did you mean "method<of int>"?" I don't know, something like that.

Code: Select all

class Program

    def main
        .method<int>(14)

    def method<of T>(argument as T)
        pass

[hopscc]

Unfortunately contrary to your expectations this

.method<int>(14)

is not just a wrongly specified collapsed generic call
( correctly specified would be

.method<of int>(14)

)

but is also instead a valid boolean expression (a ChainedCompareExpression)

#like 1 < a < 20
#  a between 1 and 19

#as in 
 .method < int > (14)
# or 
#.method < id > 14 #  id > .method() and id > 12

It (correctly) errors cos of a mismatch on the call to method signature ( as indicated - no arg)
If thats corrected it fails on the comparison of method return type vs Type (int)

Still - it is confusing...

[Chasm]

Writing parsers really must be a hassle, I didn't even see this other possibility.

[hopscc]

It is a little bit obscure. (The chainedCompare capability)

( To be honest neither did I till I started to looking why the param checking code was outputting that message just there - thought there was a bug in that code...).

Its a bit surprising and a possibly easy enough error to make for ones coming from C*/Java.

I'm just testing a patch to trap that and output something a bit more informative. (ticket:337)

[Charles]

Yeah, the type in the middle is a huge hint that something is amiss.

Sometimes I think programming languages would be better off requiring a space around binary operators such as comparisons, arithmetic, etc.

[Chasm]

Sometimes I think programming languages would be better off requiring a space around binary operators such as comparisons, arithmetic, etc.

I know you were just 'kind of' saying this, but it would make the parser less complex, the code more standardized and the error generation actually useful. Just a thought.

[basmith]

Sometimes I think programming languages would be better off requiring a space around binary operators such as comparisons, arithmetic, etc.

The upside is that would allow for hyphenated identifiers, which has always been a secret desire of mine.