Guix: An advanced operating system

Re:Guix: An advanced operating system by kazinator on Thursday January 17, 2019 @12:57PM (#18932884)

Also, any half decent Lisp dialect can tell you where an unbalanced parenthesis lies; you shouldn't have any difficulties hunting for this in a large file.

  $ txr unbal.tl 
  unbal.tl:8: syntax error
  unbal.tl:8: unterminated expression
  unbal.tl:8: while parsing form starting at line 5
  $ pr -Tn unbal.tl
      1   (defun foo()
      2   
      3     )
      4   
      5   (defun bar()
      6     (let (x)
      7       )

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Re:Guix: An advanced operating system by m45t3r on Saturday January 19, 2019 @06:39AM (#18946500)

I don't think this is a great error message. I use Clojure everyday and I still had to look 2 times to find the error.

If it was something like this, this would be much better:

  Unmatched parenthesis from starting at line 5.
  Maybe you wanted to do something like this?
      1   (defun foo()
      2   
      3     )
      4   
      5   (defun bar()
      6     (let (x)
      7       )
               ^

This being a very basic code. In reality you will have multiple function calls inside more complicated functions (like a package definition in Guix), so you will end closing 10+ parenthesis and catching them can be hell.

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