Suggestion: mnemonic aliases for warning codes #7823
Comments
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Comment author: @gasche I've been thinking about implementing names for warning on-and-off for the reasons you give, and support the idea. While their use in attributes shouldn't make the code look difform, I wouldn't give too much weight to concision either in these warning naming choices (I guess I'm just not a concision person in general). I think they are more important for people reading the code than for the people writing it. |
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Comment author: @alainfrisch I also support the idea. Warning messages should display the symbolic names to make them more discoverable. Also, see #1804 . "alerts" will be identified by name, and it is planned that some language features could "raise" alert themselves. The real remaining difference with (named) warnings is that alert names are not predefined, which prevents catching typos. |
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This issue has been open one year with no activity. Consequently, it is being marked with the "stale" label. What this means is that the issue will be automatically closed in 30 days unless more comments are added or the "stale" label is removed. Comments that provide new information on the issue are especially welcome: is it still reproducible? did it appear in other contexts? how critical is it? etc. |
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I think this issue is still valid and shouldn't be closed. |
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For the CLI interface we could go the way of the C compilers/clang, and use specific flags |
Original bug ID: 7823
Reporter: @mjambon
Status: new
Resolution: open
Priority: normal
Severity: feature
Category: misc
Monitored by: @nojb @gasche @alainfrisch
Bug description
The identifiers of warnings emitted by the OCaml compilers are currently numeric and require looking them up whenever they're encountered in code. Having numeric IDs is fine when a warning takes place and it's reported by the compiler with a description of the problem. But in other cases, having only a numeric code is unhelpful and requires the reader to look it up. These situations include:
FLAGS = -w +42[@@@warning "-56"]One solution is to have the programmer add a comment reminding the reader what the warning is about, but it's a bit of work for the programmer to copy-paste the description of the warning or make up their own. Instead, I'm suggesting that English-based aliases be provided as an alternative to numeric warning codes.
I understand there's a whole art involved in creating aliases that are not too long and yet sufficiently helpful in remembering what they mean. For instance, perhaps warning 42 "Disambiguated constructor or label name." could be aliased to
--disamb-cons.In terms of syntax, we could mix numeric and non-numeric codes as in
-w +41+-disamb-cons--something-else. Or maybe-w +41+:disamb-cons:+:something-else:. Visually, I find-w +41+{disamb-cons,something-else}more satisfying but it doesn't play well with unix shells. Yet another option, since there's not much value in supporting a notion of range with non-numeric identifiers, is to have one command line option for each warning that we want to add or remove:-w +disamb-cons -w -something-elsewould be used to turn on "disamb-cons" and turn off "something-else". In this case, a lowercase letter following a plus or minus is what would indicate the beginning of a multi-character warning identifier. For inline overrides, perhaps then we could have[@@@warning "+disamb-cons -something-else +15..20-18"].The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: