> You mean, an ICE is perfectly valid as the first (and obviously then > only) error diagnostic the compiler prints for “garbage input”? > If so, I don't think that's true. What counts as “garbage” seems > a bit too subjective for that anyway.
When the input is totally nonsensical, e.g. generated by a machine for the sole purpose of torturing the compiler, an ICE is good enough and IMO the bug report should essentially be ignored. We have hundreds of open bug reports for perfectly sensible code and any of them should have higher priority. > E.g. deleting a chunk of lines from a file creates something that makes > no sense and might be considered garbage, but that can easily happen > with a botched resolution to a merge conflict (or being too trigger-happy > with git rerere :-)). I don't think it's OK for the compiler simply to > crash without first giving the user an idea of what's wrong. Sure, if the input originally comes from a real program, it's not garbage. -- Eric Botcazou
