Error processing techniques

[Guido van Rossum]

Just to let you Unix wizards have something to strive for:

On MPW, a nicely integrated programming environment for C (and Pascal
and assembler) on the Macintosh, with a strong influence from the Unix
shell, the following all nicely works together so as to make this
trivial to use (i.e., no macros needed, anybody can do it).

1) compiler error message have this form:
	file "blurfl.c"; line 123 # error: <message text>

2) 'file' is a built in command which starts editing a file in a
   separate window

3) 'line' is a built in command which moves the cursor to a line number

4) '#' is the shell comment character

5) you can move to any line in any edit window, press 'Enter' (which is
   a different key than 'Return'), and that line is executed as a shell
   command (by selecting a text region you can execute the command(s) in
   a region).

This all works together so that you can click with the mouse on the
error message, press 'Enter' and voila: you are at the offending line.

You wouldn't believe it, but their grep equivalent also does this (I was
wondering why it inserted a '#' before each line it found a while...)

Now if only it had multiprocessing, I would give up Unix immediately and
start writing utilities for MPW instead.  (Oh, they have also fixed the
problem of firing up a make without having saved your files --
apparently the low level I/O package synchronizes windows and files when
necessary.  You can also look at the output of a program in a window on
its output file...

Enthousiastically yours,

	Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido at mcvax.uucp>