[ESS-bugs] OOps! ESS partly fails in non-English locales!

[Stephen Eglen]

hi Martin,
to follow up on your mail about locales interfering with parsing
errors... I just noticed something a bit more problematic.  I presume
I'm working in the native locale

$ echo $LC_MESSAGES


(I've not set anything myself.)

and if I have a short R file:

---


x <- 9.9)
---

and then do C-c C-l, I get told 

  Errors: Use C-c ` to find error.

which is great, but then hitting C-c ` I get shown the *ESS-errors*
buffer but told "Not a syntax error."  ESS-errors shows me:
----
Error in parse(file, n = -1, NULL, "?") : syntax error on line 3
----

which from looking briefly at ess-parse-errors regexps, won't be found
by 
	  (re-search-backward
	   "^\\(Syntax error: .*\\) at line \\([0-9]*\\), file \\(.*\\)$"

should this be working in English?

Stephen


Martin Maechler writes:
 > Uaah! That's really pretty problematic.
 > 
 > I've been using and advocation the use of  C-c C-l
 > (ess-load-file, also "Load File" (2nd from top) in the ESS menu).
 > 
 > And have started wondering why it didn't work for me, in case
 > the source()ing of the file gave errors:
 > 
 > 
 > Then found the following  *ESS-errors* buffer
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 > Fehler in parse(file, n = -1, NULL, "?") : Syntaxfehler in Zeile 274
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 > 
 > and only later realized that we are searching for a match with
 > 
 >     ess-dump-error-re  which is set to "[Ee]rror"
 > 
 > hence no match in the above German language error buffer, hence
 > the (to me) most important useful feature of C-c C-l fails.
 > 
 > As a work around, we could start adding the translations of the
 > word "Error" to the  ess-dump-error-re variable  -- and that's
 > what I have now done, here locally -- assuming either English or
 > German or language where "error" is translated with something
 > like "errore" where no change is needed.
 > 
 > A nicer solution would however a bit more complicated,
 > namely have ESS call R in a way to produce an error and find the
 > corresponding word in the error message - e.g. assuming it would
 > come first, at least for something like the above  "Error in ...".
 > 
 > BTW: Running everything inside a try(...) is not a solution IMO,
 >      since that will not run correctly all R code which uses
 >      try(.) itself.
 > 
 > At the moment I think it would be great if there was an R way of
 > saying ``set LC_MESSAGES to C for the time being'' . This would
 > require that R has both the standard English and the 'locale'
 > messages loaded - or loadable during runtime. 
 > Currently, LC_MESSAGES cannot be changed from
 > inside R but must be set before R is started.
 > I have now idea how hard / inefficient / ... the above proposal
 > would be, but can imagine that this would be desirable in other
 > situations as well.  If this seems like a good idea, Kurt and I
 > should take it to R-core.
 > 
 > Actually , the issue is even larger: We have other places where
 > we assume English for 'LC_MESSAGES', e.g., in
 > 
 > (defvar ess-R-message-prefixes
 >   '("Error:" "Error in"
 >     "Warning:" "Warning in"
 >     "Warning messages?"))
 > 
 > but this only affects font-locking AFAICS.
 > 
 > Martin
 > 
 > _______________________________________________
 > ESS-bugs ESS-bugs at stat.math.ethz.ch
 > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-bugs
 > 
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