What to use for finding as many syntax errors as possible.

[Avi Gross]

Antoon,  it may also relate to an interpreter versus compiler issue.

Something like a compiler for C does not do anything except write code in
an assembly language. It can choose to keep going after an error and start
looking some more from a less stable place.

Interpreters for Python have to catch interrupts as they go and often run
code in small batches. Continuing to evaluate after an error could cause
weird effects.

So what you want is closer to a lint program that does not run code at all,
or merely writes pseudocode to a file to be run faster later.

Many languages now have blocks of code that are not really be evaluated
till later. Some code is built on the fly. And some errors are not errors
at first. Many languages let you not declare a variable before using it or
allow it to change types. In some, the text is lazily evaluated as late as
possible.

I will say that often enough a program could report more possible errors.
Putting your code into multiple files and modules may mean you could
cleanly evaluate the code and return multiple errors from many modules as
long as they are distinct. Finding all errors is not possible if recovery
from one is not guaranteed.

Take a language that uses a semicolon to end a statement. If absent usually
there would be some error but often something on the next line. Your
evaluator could do an experiment and add a semicolon and try again. This
might work 90% of the time but sometimes the error was not ending the line
with a backslash to make it continue properly, or an indentation issue and
even spelling error. No guarantees.

Is it that onerous to fix one thing and run it again? It was once when you
handed in punch cards and waited a day or on very busy machines.

On Sun, Oct 9, 2022, 1:03 PM Antoon Pardon <antoon.pardon at vub.be> wrote:

>
>
> Op 9/10/2022 om 17:49 schreef Avi Gross:
> > My guess is that finding 100 errors might turn out to be misleading. If
> you
> > fix just the first, many others would go away.
>
> At this moment I would prefer a tool that reported 100 errors, which would
> allow me to easily correct 10 real errors, over the python strategy which
> quits
> after having found one syntax error.
>
> --
> Antoon.
>
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>