Eric Botcazou <ebotca...@libertysurf.fr> writes: >> It's fine to file these ice-on-invalid bugs, but don't be surprised if >> nobody has time to work on bugs that are only triggered by unrealistic >> garbage input. > > Right, an ICE is a perfectly valid outcome for garbage input and there are > hundreds of assertions in the compiler precisely for this purpose.
You mean, an ICE is perfectly valid as the first (and obviously then only) error diagnostic the compiler prints for “garbage input”? If so, I don't think that's true. What counts as “garbage” seems a bit too subjective for that anyway. E.g. deleting a chunk of lines from a file creates something that makes no sense and might be considered garbage, but that can easily happen with a botched resolution to a merge conflict (or being too trigger-happy with git rerere :-)). I don't think it's OK for the compiler simply to crash without first giving the user an idea of what's wrong. I agree ICEs are mostly OK as a downstream effect of an error that has already been reported, but in the context of the quote above, those cases are error-recovery rather than ice-on-invalid-code. Thanks, Richard
