[racket-dev] New error messages for *SL

From: Matthew Flatt (mflatt at cs.utah.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 9 10:17:28 EDT 2011

At Sat, 9 Jul 2011 01:59:31 -0400, Guillaume Marceau wrote:
> >  * Expanding `expr' to `expression' means that the grammar tables don't
> >   fit in the available width. (Is `expr' as an abbreviation confusing
> >   to students?)
> 
> In general, yes, abbreviations are a big speed bump for students,
> enough that we put a 'no abbreviation' rule in the error message
> composition guidelines. It's somewhat important that the HTdP
> documentation be consistent with what we say in the guidelines.
> 
> The grammar chart doesn't look too wide on my machine, except for the
> two lines for "case" in Advanced. Are you seeing something else?

I see that `case' is the only one in a blue box that doesn't fit, but I
meant the grammar at the start of each language section. It doesn't fit
for any of the languages on my machines (i.e., some line extends
further than the beige bar at the top of the page).

IE handles the overflow particularly badly on my Win7 machine:
Sometimes it erases or doesn't draw text that extends beyond the
column, which sometimes has the particularly unfortunate effect of
omitting a closing parenthesis. That's probably an IE bug, but
overflowing the column creates all sorts of problems.

Maybe the solution is to add newlines. I see that the `case' production
already has newlines (though the indentation is off).




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