Wrong diagnostic when incorrectly using const generics in impl block

[rylev]

The following incorrect code produces an incorrect diagnostic

#![feature(min_const_generics)]

struct Foo<const SET: bool>;

impl Foo<const SET: bool> {
    fn set_bar() -> Foo<true> {
        Foo
    }
}

The diagnostic produced is:

error: expected one of `>`, const, lifetime, or type, found keyword `const`
 --> src/lib.rs:5:10
  |
5 | impl Foo<const SET: bool> {
  |          ^^^^^ expected one of `>`, const, lifetime, or type

Confusingly const is shown as one of the expected items to replace const.

Of course, the user most likely meant to type:

impl <const SET: bool> Foo<SET> {

Here's a playground reproducing the issue for convenience: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=nightly&mode=debug&edition=2018&gist=27ae1b8286d97da1df8240f84062a339

[fmease]

error: expected one of `>`, const, lifetime, or type, found keyword `const`

In the error message, the first instance of const is not quoted (surrounded by backticks) compared to the second one. It does not refer to the keyword named const but to const arguments/parameters. In that position, const arguments like N, 0 or {0 + 1} would be legal, consider impl Foo<0> { … }.

So technically, the diagnostic is not wrong, but confusing for the uninitiated.
One could modify the listing to "const, lifetime, type argument". However, that might not make it more comprehensible.

[rylev]

tl;dr @fmease's (ultimately more concise) analysis is correct. I'll push a fix that makes the wording at least a little clearer.

Since I've never touched the parser before, I did some investigation, and here is what I found:

(please forgive the long prose, but I thought having this explanation might be useful instead of me just deleting it)

The error starts in parse_path_segment when we first parse angle args and then expect a >. Because const does not make sense in this context, parse_angle_args_with_leading_angle_bracket_recovery returns an empty set of angle args. expect_gt then fails because it's looking for > but will find const.

The error case in expect_gt will call Parser::unexpected which calls Parser::expect_one_of(&[], &[]). Since edible and inedible are both empty, expected_one_of_not_found gets called which will build the error message ultimately only using self.expected_tokens as the tokens to fill the "expected" string.

Ultimately, these expected tokens are converted to a string inside of tokens_to_string which calls to_string on TokenType. Since one of the expected tokens is TokenType::Const, const shows up in the list of expected tokens.

TokenType::Const ended up in Parser.expected_tokens because of the call to check_const_arg in parse_generic_arg.