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

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Stephen Eglen writes:

> 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!

Yes, that looks very nice.

-k