[cfe-dev] numbered warnings & errors?

[Daniel Dunbar]

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2010, at 7:47 AM, Douglas Gregor wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm not in a particular rush to see this problem solved though,
>>> because a lot of the value of having stable warning numbers/names is
>>> in the stability, so letting our diagnostics bake for a while is good.
>>
>> Agreed. What I *don't* want is for us to feel restricted by an existing
>> numbering system, where we don't want to improve diagnostics (e.g., by
>> splitting one diagnostic into several) because some users may have
>> suppressed that diagnostic with a pragma.
>
> How is this different and better than the existing warning group stuff?
>  They are already hierarchical and unique.  The only difference is that they
> aren't in reverse dotted form?

The notable difference is that each warning does not have a unique
hierarchical identifier which also functions as its canonical name
(i.e., in documentation). We have an ad-hoc naming convention for
diagnostics in the code, but those names aren't exposed.

>From the perspective of warning groups, most diagnostics have no name,
some have multiple names, and the names as visible to the user are
totally unrelated to the internal diagnostic names.

 - Daniel

>>> I'm also curious about alternate approaches which don't rely on
>>> exposing a stable name to the user (for example, by having the
>>> compiler embed some of the documentation, which could then have a
>>> verbose link to more information -- it would still be keyed by some
>>> number + version, but not in a way that needs to be stable).
>>
>>
>> I take it as gospel that the documentation should be embedded in the
>> compiler, and then any external representation of that documentation can be
>> generated by the compiler itself.
>
> I completely agree.
>
> -Chris
>