UPDATE 2010-04-08 CLANG/LLVM comes through!. OK, I can believe I’m living in the 21st century now :-)
All languages should include well-written error messages as part of their specification. These messages should include a link to a good explanation of the problem, and anything someone learning the language might want to know, like the design behind the error.
Every standards-compliant compiler would be required to emit the readable error messages.
This could eliminate inscrutable error messages, in one fell swoop.
(The old MPW Compiler had some
quirky and humorous error messages. “This struct already has a perfectly good definition”, for example. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any compiler that had different but more useful error messages. It’s time somebody wrote one.)