[m-dev.] preferences for error contexts

[Julien Fischer]

On Fri, 15 May 2009, Peter Ross wrote:

> On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 4:18 PM, Ralph Becket <rafe at csse.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>> Paul Bone, Friday, 15 May 2009:
>>>
>>> Off topic: I should actually bother to learn how to feed make output into an
>>> editor so it can take me to the errors.  I'd prefer not to polute my source
>>> file with errors even though they can be found and removed easily.
>>>
>>> Eventually I'll set this up with Emacs once I (start and) finish my
>>> mercury-mode for emacs.
>>
>> I just split my editing window and open the .err file (I have a
>> shortcut set up to do this automatically).  Vim keeps the .err
>> view up-to-date across recompiles.
>
> I believe the vast majority of people using Mercury use vim style
> error handling, but there are some people which don't.
>
> So it looks like an option.

Actually an option isn't such a bad idea, e.g. something like
--error-message-style=<style>.  It would be useful, for example in
integrating Mercury into IDEs, to be able to output the error message
in other formats.  The error_util way of doing things certainly gives
us scope for doing so.  FWIW, I've been intending to do something
similar to the Zinc compiler.

Julien.