Re: [PATCH] Do not allow identifiers that start with a negative number.

[Alex Rozenman]

Hi,

Currently I am very busy with other tasks. Please allow me couple of days to
review it.

Alex

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 1:48 AM, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 01/15/2011 01:50 PM, Joel E. Denny wrote:
> > I could also live with either of the following, but I think
> > they're unnecessarily restrictive:
> >
> >   An identifier can be any sequence of letters, underscores, periods,
> >   dashes, and digits that does not start with an integer or float
> >   (unsigned or negative).
> >
> >   An identifier can be any sequence of letters, underscores, periods,
> >   dashes, and digits that does not start with a digit or dash.
>
> The second alternative is nice: it's simple, and easy to explain:
> it's just as easy as what's in there now.  I could easily go with that.
>
> The first alternative seems unnecessarily complicated; it's better
> to keep things simple, all other things being equal.
>
> > a loss of diagnostic information provided to the user.  Specifically,
> many
> > "possibly meant" messages are now missing.
>
> The information generated by those "possibly meant" didn't seem that
> useful to me; it seemed to be more a symptom of a syntax that was
> unnecessarily confusing.
>
> I do realize that a lot of work went into generating them.  Perhaps
> they could be put back in, but we need to figure out what should be
> accepted before worrying overly much how to diagnose things that are
> rejected.
>



-- 
Best regards,
Alex Rozenman (address@hidden).