9.2 RECOVERY FROM LEXICAL PHASE ERRORS

9.1 ERROR RECOVERY

One of the important tasks that a compiler must perform is the detection of and recovery from errors. Recovery from errors is important, because the compiler will be scanning and compiling the entire program, perhaps in the presence of errors; so as many errors as possible need to be detected .

Every phase of a compilation expects the input to be in a particular format, and whenever that input is not in the required format, an error is returned. When detecting an error, a compiler scans some of the tokens that are ahead of the error's point of occurrence. The fewer the number of tokens that must be scanned ahead of the point of error occurrence, the better the compiler's error-detection capability. For example, consider the following statement:

if a = b then x : = y + z ;

The error in the above statement will be detected in the syntactic analysis phase, but not before the syntax analyzer sees the token "then"; but the first token, itself, is in error.

After detecting an error, the first thing that a compiler is supposed to do is to report the error by producing a suitable diagnostic. A good error diagnostic should possess the following properties.

1. The message should be produced in terms of the original source program rather than in terms of some internal representation of the source program. For example, the message should be produced along with the line numbers of the source program.

2. The error message should be easy to understand by the user .

3. The error message should be specific and should localize the problem. For example, an error message should read, " x is not declared in function fun," and not just, "missing declaration".

4. The message should not be redundant; that is, the same message should not be produced again and again.

Therefore, a compiler should report errors by generating messages with the above properties. The errors captured by the compiler can be classified as either syntactic errors or semantic errors. Syntactic errors are those errors that are detected in the lexical or syntactic analysis phase by the compiler. Semantic errors are those errors detected by the compiler.