Fail-fast mode

[senier]

Despite the improvements in #625, it can still take significant time to check a specification, even with verification turned off. One reason may be that we collect as many errors as reasonable before stopping. When refining a specification interactively it may be preferable to stop on the first error.

Add a command line option for fail as early as possible and change the RecordFluxError class to immediately raise and exception should a respective global flag be set.

[treiher]

An implementation, which raises an exception as soon as an entry to RecordFluxError is added, could lead to loss of information in several cases. For example:

                            self.error.append(
                                f'conflicting conditions for field "{f.name}"',
                                Subsystem.MODEL,
                                Severity.ERROR,
                                f.identifier.location,
                            )
                            self.error.append(
                                f"condition {i1} ({f.identifier} -> {c1.target.identifier}):"
                                f" {c1_message}",
                                Subsystem.MODEL,
                                Severity.INFO,
                                c1.condition.location,
                            )
                            self.error.append(
                                f"condition {i2} ({f.identifier} -> {c2.target.identifier}):"
                                f" {c2_message}",
                                Subsystem.MODEL,
                                Severity.INFO,
                                c2.condition.location,
                            )

The use of extend instead of multiple append at the affected places should prevent that.

[senier]

The use of extend instead of multiple append at the affected places should prevent that.

What's a bit annoying is that the author of those errors must always be aware of that issue. Maybe we should only support extend (even though this complicates writing a single-error statement)?

[treiher]

Yes, it would be better if the author would be forced to do the right thing. Only supporting extend would at least prevent cases like the example shown above. I'm not sure how effective this would be in other cases. But probably it is better than nothing. Having a bit more complicated single-error statements seems acceptable to me.