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

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "StEgl" == Stephen Eglen <S.J.Eglen at damtp.cam.ac.uk>
>>>>>     on Tue, 2 Aug 2005 10:05:45 +0100 writes:

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

    StEgl> $ echo $LC_MESSAGES


    StEgl> (I've not set anything myself.)

    StEgl> and if I have a short R file:

    StEgl> ---


    StEgl> x <- 9.9)
    StEgl> ---

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

    StEgl> Errors: Use C-c ` to find error.

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

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

    StEgl> should this be working in English?

yes, it should; and we now see why it doesn't....

One thing: May be it is not "more problematic" than the
problem I reported.
The "only" mistake is the mini-buffer message "Not a syntax error",
but then one at least gets to see a relatively simply to
understand message.

The problem with the foreign (well, my "native") locales is that
you get *nothing*; You have no idea that there was an error, and
things look like  C-c C-l did work properly. 

Martin

    StEgl> Stephen


    StEgl> 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