[TUHS] The 'usage: ...' message. (Was: On Bloat...)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 19 May 2024, Douglas McIlroy wrote:

> Another non-descriptive style of error message that I admired was that 
> of Berkeley Pascal's syntax diagnostics. When the LR parser could not 
> proceed, it reported where, and automatically provided a sample token 
> that would allow the parsing to progress. I found this uniform 
> convention to be at least as informative as distinct hand-crafted 
> messages, which almost by definition can't foresee every contingency. 
> Alas, this elegant scheme seems not to have inspired imitators.

I did something like that for our compiler-writing assignment.  An 
ALGOL-like language (I think I used ALGOLW) it would detect when a 
semicolon was missing, and insert it (with a warning).  As a test case, it 
successfully compiled a program with no semicolons at all...

-- Dave