The Deadly Sins

[Dan Shafer]

Yeah, I *know* that intellectually, but it always seemed to me that a  
sufficiently intelligent compiler could be designed that would be  
able to dope that out correctly a huge percentage of the time.

Besides, I like screaming at compilers at 3 a.m.

BTW and FWIW, in the last year or so that I was able to use Smalltalk  
as my development platform of choice, it had become quite  
sophisticated in this sense. If you made a "syntax error," for  
example, it would suggest known method, class and identifier names  
that you might have meant. It was uncannily able to "guess" the right  
one as its first choice. Saved me a ton of time I'd have spent re- 
editing and recompiling Java.


On Sep 22, 2005, at 1:27 AM, Cubist at aol.com wrote:

>    Because the compiler *doesn't* know whether you (a) neglected to  
> put the
> semicolon at the end of that line, or (b) accidentally hit return  
> and kept on
> typing. The appropriate response for each case is different. Which  
> begs the
> question: How is the compiler supposed to determine which response  
> it should
> apply?
>



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
http://www.shafermedia.com
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