Ohad Rodeh wrote:
> 
> The characters are no good to me in debugging. I suppose they make
> sense from the compiler's point of view, but they are no use to me.

Under Emacs or XEmacs : '->' or C-f move forward one character, and
C-u n repeat a command n times. So C-u n '->' where n is the location
returned by the assert failure and when done at the beginning of the
specified file will point you at the right piece of code.

-- Nicolas