[Python-ideas] Reporting unmatched parentheses in SyntaxError messages?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Nick Coghlan writes:

 > One of the more opaque error messages new Python users can encounter
 > is a syntax error due to unmatched parentheses:
 > 
 >     File "/home/me/myfile.py", line 11
 >         data = func()
 >         ^
 >     SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Agreed.  Could be worse, though, it could be Lisp!

 > While I have no idea how we could implement it, I'm wondering if that
 > might be clearer if the error message instead looked more like this:
 > 
 >     File "/home/me/myfile.py", line 11
 >         data = func()
 >         ^
 >     SyntaxError: invalid syntax (Unmatched '(' on line 10)

I think I would prefer "Expected ')'".  I think that typos like

    a = ((1, "one"),
         (2, "two)",
         (3, "three"))
    data = func()

are likely to be fairly common (I make them often enough!), but I
don't see how you're going to get the parser to identify the line
containing "couple #2" as the source of the error (without a *really*
dubious heuristic).

 > I'm not sure it would be feasible though - we generate syntax errors
 > from a range of locations where we don't have access to the original
 > token data any more :(

Is the problem that we don't know which line the unmatched parenthesis
was on, or that we don't even know that the syntax error is an
unmatched parenthesis?