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My 2nd CS course at college was (I'm showing my age here) PL1 programming. The Watfiv compiler would correct obvious parse errors. Often, this would lead to muc
by bwanab 5y ago
My 2nd CS course at college was (I'm showing my age here) PL1 programming. The Watfiv compiler would correct obvious parse errors. Often, this would lead to much more insidious and not-so-obvious bugs down the line.
- njacobs5074 5y agoThe Pascal compiler on our CDC Cyber (used by undergraduate courses when I went to NYU) would do this, too. Yeah, was a long time ago :)
- julian55 5y agoI also remember when compilers made more of an effort to fix trivial errors. It was worth it when using a batch system and you could only run a few compilations each day.
- vincent-manis 5y agoI think you're thinking of Cornell's PL/C compiler (Watfiv was for Fortran, and didn't have a lot of error-correction), circa 1970ish. PL/C would famously convert PTU LIST('Hello, world! into a valid program (in fact, the claim was that it would never fail to convert any string of text into a valid program). PL/C made a lot of sense when short student programs were entered on punched cards (and hence trivial typos were tedious to correct) and batch turnaround times were measured in hours. This makes much less sense when (a) editors can give us clues about typos right away, e.g., by indenting in a surprising way, and (b) compile times for short modules are very short.
- bwanab 5y agoYes, you’re right - it’s been a long time. So long, in fact that I was using punch cards at the time. I remember getting my printouts and wondering at the results only to realize that it had converted bad input text into a “valid” program. Good times.