type error formatting

[MigMit]

> On 25 Oct 2015, at 21:21, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
> 
> Am Samstag, den 24.10.2015, 22:30 +0200 schrieb MigMit:
>> At the very least, "bound at" should help IDEs (Emacs in particular)
>> show exactly the right places.
> 
> an IDE that offers such a deep integration will hopefully not parse
> data meant for human consumption.

Hope is good. Reality, however, is different. At least haskell-mode in Emacs DOES parse such data, when you try to load your file in REPL.

> IDEs should ideally make use of something based on the GHC API.

I agree. But the key word here is "ideally".

Second thought though — do we really want to create a gap between error messages from the compiler and whatever IDE tells us? After all, text output from GHC is ALSO a kind of API.

> If that
> is not possible, then I’d advocate a flag, say "-fverbose-error-
> messages" or similar that includes all detail that might be relevant
> for an IDE, and maybe even in a nicer-to-parse format.

Doesn't seem worth it to me. Current format is quite parseable, and not really bad for human eyes either.