Assembly Error Message

[barnjamin]

Problem

When using the API to compile a teal contract, if there is a syntax error or something else the error returned is a generic "%d error(s)" with no hints on what it might be.

The assembler does have some list of the errors but summarizes them with a count here:
https://github.com/algorand/go-algorand/blob/master/data/transactions/logic/assembler.go#L1676-L1682

Is this done for a specific reason or could we return some string with all the error messages or at least the first N?

[hernandp]

I asked a similar feature, but using integers as error codes.
#3013

[algochoi]

I think the discrepancy is because in the goal clerk command, ReportProblems() is explicitly called and returns the error array to stderr.

However, it seems like we do not do this for the /teal/compile/ API endpoint yet. We call assemble(), which only returns the number of errors in a program. If we could also report the error array here, I think it would save a lot of devs trouble 😅