[plt-scheme] Re: error msgs in Scheme and C

On Aug 11, 2004, at 2:01 PM, Paul A. Steckler wrote:

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>> The C people didn't get this any "rigther" than the Scheme people.
>> They were forced to report as many type and syntax errors in one
>> pass as possible because they were and are batch people, who just
>> don't understand how incremental work helps people.
>
> I remember a product called C-terp from many years ago.
> It was supposed to allow you to develop C programs
> incrementally.  Never tried it, though.

Hmm... my bet is that what you meant was that it presented a REPL for 
C.  It seems to me that our understanding of "incremental development" 
has moved beyond the REPL; now that compilers are relatively fast, you 
get things like Eclipse (and a certain usage pattern for DrScheme) 
where you have a set of test cases that are run (either transparently 
or manually) with every small change to the program.  In a world like 
this (as I think Matthias is pointing out) getting a whole bunch of 
syntactic errors at once isn't as important, because the syntax errors 
you make will be flagged immediately, rather than having to fix a 
bazillion of them after typing in a long program.

john

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