• marcos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    GHC messages are complete and precise, usually telling you everything you need to know to understand, find, and fix the error, that may not even be on the place it’s actually detected.

    It’s also in an alien language. That’s correct.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      complete and precise

      Exactly. It’s a perfectly condensed yet totally complete readout of all the data you might need for debugging. It makes mathematicians everywhere proud.

      If you don’t actually need a complete set of information about possible exotic type choices just to see you put an infix in the wrong place that’s basically not the compiler’s problem.

      (TBF, I wouldn’t want to try and mindread the programmer in my compiler either, but then I am a maths person)

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I dunno. That set of information about exotic type choices helps me very often. And I can always ignore it when it’s not useful.

        The bunch of “yes, compiled that module, everything is all right” messages in between them and warnings not surviving a second compilation bother me much more than the error messages. But learning to read the messages was not easy.