Unintuitive error message caused by [*]

[matthew-mcallister]

On master, I tried using the wrong syntax for pointer dereferencing and got a surprising error message (similar in appearance to #401) on this minimal input:

zig[*zag]

Output:

/home/mattmcal/foo.zig:1:6: error: invalid character: 'z'
zig[*zag]
     ^

Obviously, the mistake is not my use of the letter 'z' but rather that I have a malformed expression.

[matthew-mcallister]

So I fired up gdb and found out that [*] is treated as a single token by the tokenizer, which explains where the arrow location comes from. I guess this isn't a bug per se, the error message is just surprising. I suppose this suggests the need for better parsing error messages in the future, but I'm going to close this issue on the premise that it's probably a low-ish priority and merits a separate issue anyways.

EDIT: On second thought, I think it makes more sense to just leave the issue open to document the concern. Sry 'bout that.

[andrewrk]

Thanks for the report! I agree that it's worth it to improve this error message.