Summary

Report the top-level binding that an error occurs in

Metadata

Description

One bane of my life is errors like this:

 Warning: reference to possibly unbound identifier: archive
 
 Error: module unresolved: ugarit-core

...when just about *every* procedure in ugarit-core has an 'archive' parameter. I eventually traced down the problem with a binary chop by putting deliberate references to unbound identifiers in and looking at the order of the unbound identifiers reported.

I'm not sure if line-number information persists into the expander, but I think that it should be possible to work out the name of the top-level binding (DEFINE, DEFINE-SYNTAX, or whatever) it's inside. I'm guessing that the unbound references are detected after any macros that expand *into* top-level bindings are expanded, so this mechanism would still produce useful results in such situations.

Inside the expander, ##sys#register-undefined registers undefined symbols, but it only seems to be called by ##sys#alias-global-hook which is in turn called only by ##sys#strip-syntax, and I'm not sufficiently versed in Chicken internals to work out what's what above that, as it's called in lots of places.

I see that it's called directly inside many of the core macro definitions inside expander.scm; would it therefore suffice to define a parameter for the "current top-level definition" and set it to the defined name in the macro expanders for DEFINE, DEFINE-SYNTAX, and any others, and if that parameter is not at its default value of #f, report it in errors (and make the unbound identifier list for the module be a list of pairs, mapping unbound identifiers to the top-level definitions they're in?

Would that work, or is strip-syntax called in other dynamic contexts?

Changes and comments

[2010-09-13 09:46:33 UTC] felix changed status from new to assigned

[2010-09-13 09:46:33 UTC] felix set owner to felix

[2010-10-08 09:11:12 UTC] felix changed status from assigned to closed

[2010-10-08 09:11:12 UTC] felix set resolution to fixed

[2010-10-08 09:11:12 UTC] felix wrote:

Should be better in 4.6.2. This required passing along the name of the current "containing" lambda expression inside the code-walker for the compiler and wasn't completely trivial. Apologies for the delay.

[2011-06-01 09:00:41 UTC] felix changed milestone from 4.7.0 to 4.8.0

[2011-06-01 09:00:41 UTC] felix wrote:

Milestone 4.7.0 deleted

[2012-09-24 21:47:48 UTC] felix changed milestone from 4.8.0 to 4.9.0

[2012-09-24 21:47:48 UTC] felix wrote:

Milestone 4.8.0 deleted