On 13 May 2015, at 10:41, Damien Pollet <damien.pollet@gmail.com> wrote:

On 13 May 2015 at 08:35, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr> wrote:
Only three methods are needed to allow generating executable methods from such an AST: the SyntaxErrorNotification
 is raised at runtime instead of compile time.

I can hear the noise of eyebrows raising in the compiler community :)


Yes! :-)

Syntax errors shouldn't require immediate fixing during compilation per se, but there should be a way to deal with them "at compile time" ���whatever that means for us. For instance, faulty methods could have a flashy icon in the browser; I think I'd even color the whole package-class-protocol-selector in red if either of them contain faulty methods.


I think that GT does it already right: it does not insert the error message in the text, but instead shows it using a tiny window undefendend of the text.
Combined with syntax highlighting, this should be very close to what we need (the devil is in the detail, of course).

As for finding them: the nice property of syntax errors is that they are trivial to detect statically��� so e.g. we can add that people never can commit code like that, and
of course code critics can find it trivially��� the rule just needs to check for #isFaulty (maybe we should range that to #hasSyntaxErrors).

Marcus