Re: scratch/accurate-warning-pos: next steps.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> I'm not sure how this special-purpose code would work.  Say we find an
>> error or warning involving symbol foo as the car of some form, I can't
>> see any way of determining its source position that doesn't involve going
>> back to the position of the beginning of the form, and slogging through
>> the form, somehow.
> Yes, I was proposing something like that.  Why is that a problem?

IIUC what you're suggesting here is to add a heuristic which takes an
arbitrary chunk of code (can be a single symbol but not necessarily), an
approximate source location, and then tries to compute a better source
location from it.

I think making this 100% reliable (either in the sense of "return the
*right* location" or just "return a location that's sometimes/often
better and never worse") is somewhere between very hard and impossible.

But maybe a few well chosen heuristics could indeed give a significant
improvement (i.e. return a location that's sometimes/often better and
rarely worse).  To help the heuristic, we could pass it some indication
of the error (e.g. so it knows whether the symbol (or chunk of code)
we're looking for is expected to be in the position of a normal
expression, a let-binding, a var definition, a function definition,
a function call, ...).

Oh wait: I think if we return a range rather than a single position, we
could make it reliable in the sense that the actual position is within
the range (but sometimes the range will degenerate to cover a whole
top-level definition).


        Stefan