[cfe-commits] Request feedback for new diagnostic feature - template type diffing

[Chandler Carruth]

Let's not get too side tracked on fixits...

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 8:56 PM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For the current issue at hand - I'm with Doug on this. I think visual
> highlighting could add a lot of value over any solution that tries to be
> terminal coloring agnostic.
>

Again, I'm not suggesting that color doesn't have value. I'm suggesting that
we shouldn't encode *information* in color that isn't otherwise present in
the text. That's very different from the color making the information more
valuable (often through improved clarity).


> That's not to say that we can't provide some degraded experience to
> non-colored users, but I think it will be inherently worse than
> highlighting.
>

The problem is *how* you provide the degraded experience. Sure, in some
cases, the clang driver detects whether or not we have a terminal available
that can render colors. However, there are many cases where *after* that
detection occurs, the colors are then stripped out by various pieces of
software. This can happen with screen, ssh, log processing, some defective
terminals, etc. That means that we don't have the opportunity to generate
more text at the moment the color gets stripped. The worst case scenario for
me are problems of colorblindness. ;]

As for how to do it
>

Snipping the how. I'm interested in figuring out the "what" before focusing
on the how. I think Richard was actually looking at doing highlighting
already, so I suspect he has some plans.

I don't think it's hard to believe that highlighting (& other things we can
> do with a terminal) adds value & thus non-colored users (for any/all of the
> reasons you cite) are going to get less value.
>

Again, there is an important difference between "less value" and "less
information".
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