Line numbers in stack traces

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Informed that
    The [Erlang] virtual machine has no information about line numbers.
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED> asked

	Isn't that a design limitation of the virtual machine code format?
	I think language VMs should be designed to allow this at least in a
	debugging mode.
	
There are a number of assumptions hidden here:
(1) all VM code comes from source code
(2) all source code is hand-written
(3) therefore all VM code *has* line numbers
    which it is simply incompetent of the VM not to retain.
(4) the relationship between source lines and VM code is easy to maintain.

Since Erlang/OTP provides several ways to generate and manipulate source
code, (1) and (2) are false.  Even in C, macros place serious limits on
the utility of line numbers:  a single "function call" in a line may
expand to hundreds of tokens which cannot be stepped into, and the line
where the error *is* may be in a completely different file from the
reported line.  Erlang macros are regrettably similar to C macros.

Then we mustn't forget things like YECC and code generators like ASN.1
(see 'asn1') and CORBA interfaces (see 'ic').

While this is not yet a major consideration for Erlang, consider the
fact that compilers for functional programming languages tend to do
*major* restructuring, starting with in-line expansion, simplification,
reordering, and progressing to things like deforestation (which is
certainly applicable to Erlang).  The practical consequence of this is
that a few bytes of code (BEAM or other VM or HiPE-generated native
code) may contain bits of many different functions, so that line number
information would overwhelm actual useful code.

I'd rather see a QuickCheck for Erlang; is there one?