Previously, type or coercion errors for string interpolation, path
interpolation, and plus expressions were always reported at the
beginning of the outer expression. This leads to confusing evaluation
error messages making it hard to accurately diagnose and then fix the
error.
For example, errors were reported as follows.
```
cannot coerce an integer to a string
1| let foo = 7; in "bar" + foo
| ^
cannot add a string to an integer
1| let foo = "bar"; in 4 + foo
| ^
cannot coerce an integer to a string
1| let foo = 7; in "x${foo}"
| ^
```
This commit changes the ExprConcatStrings expression vector to store a
sequence of expressions *and* their expansion locations so that error
locations can be reported accurately. For interpolation, the error is
reported at the beginning of the entire `${foo}`, not at the beginning
of `foo` because I thought this was slightly clearer. The previous
errors are now reported as:
```
cannot coerce an integer to a string
1| let foo = 7; in "bar" + foo
| ^
cannot add a string to an integer
1| let foo = "bar"; in 4 + foo
| ^
cannot coerce an integer to a string
1| let foo = 7; in "x${foo}"
| ^
```
The error is reported at this kind of precise location even for
multi-line indented strings.
This probably helps with at least some of the cases mentioned in #561
This fixes a class of crashes and introduces ptr<T> to make the
code robust against this failure mode going forward.
Thanks regnat for the idea of a ref<T> without overhead!
Closes#4895Closes#4893Closes#5127Closes#5113
When working on some more complex Nix code, there are sometimes rather
unhelpful or misleading error messages, especially if coerce-errors are
thrown.
This patch is a first steps towards improving that. I'm happy to file
more changes after that, but I'd like to gather some feedback first.
To summarize, this patch does the following things:
* Attrsets (a.k.a. `Bindings` in `libexpr`) now have a `Pos`. This is
helpful e.g. to identify which attribute-set in `listToAttrs` is
invalid.
* The `Value`-struct has a new method named `determinePos` which tries
to guess the position of a value and falls back to a default if that's
not possible.
This can be used to provide better messages if a coercion fails.
* The new `determinePos`-API is used by `builtins.concatMap` now. With
that change, Nix shows the exact position in the error where a wrong
value was returned by the lambda.
To make sure it's still obvious that `concatMap` is the problem,
another stack-frame was added.
* The changes described above can be added to every other `primop`, but
first I'd like to get some feedback about the overall approach.
