bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #63202, [troff] missing delimiter...

 
 

bug #63202: [troff] missing delimiter diagnostics could say what they were expecting

Submitter:  G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Submitted:  Wed 12 Oct 2022 06:33:11 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  Core Severity:  1 - Wish
Item Group:  Warning/Suspicious behaviour Status:  None
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Open/Closed:  Open Planned Release:  None
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Wed 12 Oct 2022 06:33:11 PM UTC, original submission:  

In all of the escape sequences that accept user-determined delimiters, we have diagnostic messages that complain of a missing closing one.

We could therefore say in those messages which delimiter we were expecting, which might make life easier, especially for users who bother to distinguish their nested delimiters instead of just spraying apostrophes everywhere and praying.  The opening delimiter is always stored already as `start`, or in one case `delim`, so there's no overhead to giving the user this information.

However, an attempt to dash this off in five minutes revealed two problems:

1.  Those damnable newline-accepting escape sequences only throw the mismatch diagnostic upon EOF.  When I try to make them complain when a newline is read and it's NOT the delimiter, my regression test trips.  So this feature, apart from being of dubious worth, is subtle and quick to anger.

2.  Having applied, I was sometimes told that the opening delimiter was a "node".  This is not helpful feedback to the user.

Come back to this someday.  The fact that we now (post-groff 1.22.4) identify which escape sequence is being processed when trouble occurs may mitigate the motivation I offered in paragraph 2 above.


G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
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