I'm teaching CS1 right now, and am daily reminded about just how utterly awful compiler messages are if you don't already understand how compilers work. Not on

I'm teaching CS1 right now, and am daily reminded about just how utterly awful compiler messages are if you don't already understand how compilers work. Not only is this a good idea in general, it also adapts nicely to the educational case: the likely use-case to trigger a particular parser error state might be different for a beginner, and thus require a different error message, but it sounds like it would be easy to swap out one (state,nexttok)->errmsg mapping for another.