my status

[Ben Pfaff]

So... I was working on improved error handling.  I am still
working on this.  Improvement will be major, I hope, when I check
in the changes.  First, error reporting and error display will be
separated.  In particular, calling msg() will just assemble the
message into an error structure, which is then passed to the user
interface code via function pointer.  Thus, the two UIs can
display errors in completely different ways while retaining a
common, convenient interface for the code that wants to report
the error.

Second, I'm separating the reporting mechanism for errors that
originate in different ways.  Syntax errors and data errors (SE,
SW, DE, DW) will continue to be reported with msg().  Other
errors (IE, IW, etc.) will change to being reported with error()
or error_at_line().  This is an important change because it lets
us do something I've wanted to do for a long time: route errors
and warnings into the listing file (as well as to the console).
Currently that doesn't work because writing output can cause an
error in the output driver, which would call msg(), which would
try to writing output, etc.  There are other solutions but this
seems particularly clean in multiple ways.

Third, I'm going to improve the way that errors are displayed.
I want to make it something more like gcc's, so that a typical
error would look a bit like this:

        While reading file included from foo.pspp,
                           included from bar.pspp:
        quux.pspp:123: parsing DESCRIPTIVES procedure:
        quux.pspp:123: Z-score variable name XYZ would be a duplicate name.

In the meantime I've been busy with paper deadlines, and I've
become distracted with other issues.  In particular, I've been
thinking about internationalization.  I've been reworking the
PostScript driver to better support i18n, and I've been thinking
about how to better support it in PSPP in general.  I'll likely
check in a new PostScript driver that does a better job, but it's
hard to say when.  I've been reading the Unicode standard and
documentation from Adobe and others, trying to learn as much as I
can about these issues.
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
email: address@hidden
web: http://benpfaff.org