From: Chris Croughton Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: Data types Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 17:38:06 +0100 Message-ID: <34C775EE.2847@amc.de> References: <199801221552 DOT RAA10631 AT ankara DOT duzen DOT com DOT tr> NNTP-Posting-Host: bob.bob.bofh.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 44 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk S. M. Halloran wrote: > > > When will GNU put out a version of gcc which has an > AutoCorrect feature (of the kind seen in programs like MS Word) so > that actions clearly intended by the programmer are carried out to > the final conclusion? > I knew a compiler which did! Seriously. It's always annoyed me when compilers say things like "missing semicolon" - if they know it's missing why don'tthey just insert it? One of the early Ada compilers did just that. If it could work out what was wrong it corrected it and tried to compile the rest of the program. If it succeeded then it output a message warning you that the executable might not be correct but still generated it, allowing you to make the decision. I have to say that I never caught it out in an incorrect 'correction'. It almost certainly could have been done, and perhaps Ada is a little bit easier to do that with than C (more 'redundancy' in te linguistic sense), but it certainly saved time. Of course, that was in the days when a 200 line program took 20 minutes to compile; far more time was wasted in editing the source and recompiling than in just trying to run the program and letting the debugger catch the errors. And it wasn't a production compiler, in fact it said in the manual that for production code that option must be switched off. What I want is the telepathic interface. "Look, I know I /wrote/ i++ but it's obvious I /meant/ j++!"... > > Indeed Microsoft probably uses such an autocorrecting compiler, > since it clearly seems to be the compiler that produced Windows 95. > I don't regard that as humour. I regard it as the most probable scenario. Oh, you said 'humor' not 'humour' - that's the difference, I was thinking of British humour ... Chris C