Consider the problem of compilers emitting messages for bad code. You'll
have like 3 warnings and 2 errors, and possibly 2 page fulls of
messages.
You want to improve things, make it faster to find the problem, so you
would like the error to be more noticeable than the warning.
Some things you can do:
- Indentation, sacrificing vertical space which might be a scarce
resources.
- uppercase, maybe? this isn't very noticeable, and if anyone has
scripts to search, you'll probably break them.
- Emit less information by default. This might be a problem if changing
compilation flags isn't trivial, or the failure takes long to reach,
or the failure is reached by a user, then you must communicate "please
run this again but wth EMIT_ALL_THE_INFORMATION_I_NEED=yes"
Or you can:
- Get the best of all worlds, not have to change anything, and emit the
word "error:' in another color for interactive users.