[babel] Should babel be more error intolerant?

[Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@gmail.com>]

Hi,

just playing around with a new aspect of org-mode and babel, I
noticed, that many of my typos and wrong syntax using are silently
accepted resp. ignored.
Even the message buffer keeps quite.
I just wonder if babel should be more error intolerant to tell users
that they are actually doing something wrong.
E.g., I don't see any error messages for (marked the typo by *):


#+begin_src latex :file*s* fig/mypicture.pdf :packages '(("" "tikz"))
:border 1em :fit  :results output silent
or
#+begin_src latex :file fig/mypicture.pdf :packages '(("" "tikz"))
:border 1em :fit  :*result* output silent
or
#+begin_src latex :file fig/mypicture.pdf :packages '(("" "tikz"))
:border 1em :fit  :results output *quite*

obviously the above errors might happen quickly just as typos or
because one tries to use commands from memory.

Trying something new, this might drive someone quickly crazy. One is
going to tackle the problem in many different ways and finally after
several minutes (or even hours) one notice its simply "silent" and not
"quite" ;)

I would prefer a bold
Error ":results output quite" is unknown to babel
in the minibuffer, maybe including jumping to the line in question.
Others might like to keep it quite (or silent), I guess it could be
easily set by an optional flag
like #+BABEL:debug:t

As a side note of this, I wonder if babel could use the same/similar
way like the TODO field in org-mode to switch between all possible
parameters for a certain code block?
I learned, different code blocks can have quite different possible
parameters. A bit difficult to remember esp., if you don't use them on
a daily basis.
If one could place the pointer to e.g., the :results keyword and hit
C-c C-t to switch between all possibilities for the :exports keyword
for this particular source code block, it would greatly simply the
usage and reduce errors. Parameters which require additional user
input like file names could indicate this (like in the manual) by
indicating it within brackets e.g., <filename>.

Thanks for all the help and support

Torsten