Re: Emacs and GFortran

[David Kastrup]

Brooks Moses <address@hidden> writes:

> There is still an off-by-one error; we number the first column as 1
> rather than 0.  Given that there's a very strong tradition in
> Fortran of numbering columns starting with 1, and that off-by-one
> errors in column location are within the noise level of locating
> things (given that nearly all errors are several columns wide), I
> think it makes more sense overall to keep it the way it currently
> is.

I don't actually agree: the error message already contains a
human-readable column indicator in form of the single 1 in the line
below.  The numeric column number is for the sake of computers and in
a computer-readable format, so it would make sense to have it look
just like expected from this format.

Personally, I find it sort of weird to start lines with 1 and columns
with 0, but the point of a machine-readable format is that everybody
does it the same.

I'd suggest that column 1 in Fortran is just called column 1 because
column 0 contains the ASA print control character
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASA_carriage_control_characters>,
but then I'd sound silly...

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum