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

[Stephen Eglen]

Martin Maechler writes:
 > >>>>> "StEgl" == Stephen Eglen <S.J.Eglen at damtp.cam.ac.uk>
 > >>>>>     on Tue, 2 Aug 2005 12:31:40 +0100 writes:
 > 
 >     StEgl> thanks for follow up Martin.
 > 
 >     >> 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.
 > 
 >     StEgl> Yes, agree - sorry, "problematic" was a bad choice of wording from me.
 > 
 >     StEgl> I can fix the regexp for this particular error:
 > 
 >     StEgl> Error in parse(file, n = -1, NULL, "?") : syntax error on line 3
 > 
 >     StEgl> perhaps by a regexp searching for
 > 
 >     StEgl> syntax error on line [line number]
 > 
 >     StEgl> but is that likely to be good enough for catching all R errors?
 > 
 > not all R errors for sure.
 > 
 > But for C-c C-l, we know that R (and S-plus) uses source(),
 > so we have to think about the errors that happen from source().
 > 
 > There, the syntax error is really a special interesting case,
 > because that one can be pointed to by a line number.
 > For R, it will always happen from
 >     .Internal(parse(file, n = -1, NULL, "?")))
 > 
 > now that leads to calling do_parse in source.c, i.e.
 >     https://svn.R-project.org/R/trunk/src/main/source.c
 > 
 > which shows you
 > 
 > 	if (status != PARSE_OK)
 > 	    errorcall(call, _("syntax error on line %d"), R_ParseError);
 > 
 > The "errorcall(call, ..)" part entails that the message (in an
 > English locale!) will be
 > 
 >   Error in parse(.....) : syntax error on line <n>
 > 
 > In a German locale, it's e.g.
 > 
 >   Fehler in parse(file, n = -1, NULL, "?") : Syntaxfehler in Zeile 1
 > 
 > --
 > 
 > Hence, for English
 > 
 >        "^Error .* syntax error"
 > or German
 >        "^Fehler .* Syntaxfehler"
 > 
 > would work.
 > I think ideally, one would make use of the things we have
 > already
 > 	ess-dump-error-re  ( == "[Ee]rror" for English)
 > 
 > and/or better of something derived from
 > 
 > 	(defvar ess-R-message-prefixes
 > 	  '("Error:" "Error in"
 > 	    "Warning:" "Warning in"
 > 	    "Warning messages?"))
 > 
 > (which would need to be put in two parts: one for errors the
 >  other for warnings).

Ok, I can take a look at this tomorrow, to at least get the errors
detected again.

 > I still think the best solution would be that R (or S-plus or
 > ...) at startup of "inferior-*"
 > produces these errors on purpose by eval-ing erronous examples
 > i.e. sends some commands to R such as 
 > 
 >    parse(text="1]")
 >    eval(parse(text="rpois(-1)"))
 >    eval(parse(text="rpois(-1,1)"))
 >    cat("1]", file=(.tf <- tempfile())) ; try(parse(file=.tf)); unlink(.tf)
 > 
 > and out of the R (or S+ ..)
 > error message  auto-produces the relevant pattern to use.
 > 
 > This way, ESS adapts to the system, including locale setting,
 > also for future systems / locales.

That sounds like a really neat idea if we can add that!

Stephen