This is the first cut at providing human-readable context for command
line parsing failures. Since these failures are due to incorrect
input (normally produced by a human), closing the information loop at
the human layer makes a hell of a lot more sense than dumping an error
traceback with a (possibly cryptic) error name and calling it a day.
This approach doesn't print anything out by default and still depends
on the user to choose exactly how the handle and print the error
message. Errors are propagated from subcommands, though they end up
being copied, which shouldn't be strictly necessary. Maybe this can be
improved in the future. OutOfMemory has been added to ParseError to
simplify the code a bit.
The demo has been updated with a simplistic example of what presenting
error messages to the user may look like. I don't know that this
produces useful messages for every possible failure scenario, but it
does for the most common ones.
This needs a bit more thought. To support outside-in error writing,
converters need access to an allocator so they can create new buffer
writers. This can be done by passing in a pointer to an ArrayList
object directly, rather than an already bound writer.
I believe we've produced a superset of the functionality that was
present before rewriting all of the code.
There are still a lot of fiddly little details that need to be thought
through in order to produce something that is righteously flexible,
but I think this is in reasonable shape to start inventing real-world
uses for it.
Adding some tests, cleaning up a little bit of the allocation handling
(make better use of the arena allocators—we are definitely sort of
leaking memory at the moment), and writing documentation are still on
the roadmap.
the checklist of things to do is continuing to dwindle. hooray. last
big feature push is help text generation. Then improving error
reporting. Then writing some tests. Then writing documentation.
Ay carumba.
