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

[Barry]

> On 9 Oct 2022, at 18:54, Antoon Pardon <antoon.pardon at vub.be> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Op 9/10/2022 om 19:23 schreef Karsten Hilbert:
>> Am Sun, Oct 09, 2022 at 06:59:36PM +0200 schrieb Antoon Pardon:
>> 
>>> 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.
>> But the point is: you can't (there is no way to) be sure the
>> 9+ errors really are errors.
>> 
>> Unless you further constrict what sorts of errors you are
>> looking for and what margin of error or leeway for false
>> positives you want to allow.
> 
> Look when I was at the university we had to program in Pascal and
> the compilor we used continued parsing until the end. Sure there
> were times that after a number of reported errors the number of
> false positives became so high it was useless trying to find the
> remaining true ones, but it still was more efficient to correct the
> obvious ones, than to only correct the first one.

If it’s very fast to syntax check then one at a time is fine.
Python is very fast to syntax check so I personal do not need the multi error version.
My editor has syntax check on a key and it’s instant to drop me a syntax error.

Barry

> 
> I don't need to be sure. Even the occasional wrong correction
> is probably still more efficient than quiting after the first
> syntax error.
> 
> -- 
> Antoon.
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>