Added v2 of patch that will handle any exception during parsing. Similar could be done during code generation. This approach seems much more robust and less invasive.

That v2 was made hastily. Upon further thought, it seems broken in the face of recursive analysis. I think the right thing, if we prefer the exception catching approach, is to rethrow as a custom exception type, which would be allowed through un-re-wrapped.

For example:

(try
  (parse-form ...)
  (catch AnalysisError e
    throw e)
  (catch Throwable e
    (throw (AnalysisError. env e))))

I don't have a problem with the approach in the first patch. I don't really see how a less invasive patch is even possible - you still need to pass the environment to some assertion check if you are going to throw a custom exception as well.

v3 of patch fixes issue with v2

v4 of patch as discussed in irc

v5 also catches error from parse-invoke

v6 improves errors in repl as discussed in IRC

fixed, http://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/commit/af4ab91754d30f082b117b40c07ea94d0063c0d6