Unknown what?

[Ron Natalie <ron>]

> Last night I compiled a program on my 2.9BSD system that still had
> some typos in it.  One particularly interesting error message was
> 
> Unknown keyword
> 
> Not only does that not the describe the problem (a missing }) but that 
> doesn't make sense for any problem.  I don't know what the standards 
> committee has to say about error messages, but perhaps we need a line
> in the standard prohibiting oxymorons. :-)
> 
Some compilers are trying to address the error message problem (like
Tartan claims to be attempting if they ever get it working).  For an
interesting reference in the Journal of Software Theory and Practice
there wsa a paper (about three years ago) called "My compiler gives good
error messages -- or does it?"  They took a Pascal program and introduced
a trivial typo-style bug into it to see what message various compilers gave.
Their last example was nominated for a special award, it looked like

     write(tty, foo);
                     ^
                     Missing Semicolon

=Ron