Re: TeX error handling

[Karl Berry]

    It would help if the 'lines 1869--1869' messages (shouldn't that be
    'line 1869'!?) 

Well, it's not incorrect.  Knuth did it that way, it doesn't seem worth
changing.

    mentioned a filename.  

Knuth's idea was to look backward for ( to see the last file input.
Programming was different in 1978.

In the last few releases, an option --file-line-error has been added to
make (Web2c-based) TeX output errors in filename:lineno:msg.  texi2dvi
uses that option automatically if the TeX it finds supports it.  So I
surmise that you are using a version of tex that is several years old.