Hi Marc,
I now receive the error message but too late as I'm no longer in my
table altering dialog. Many kinds of errors could happen here, not just
the one I pointed. As another example, changing the type from INT to
VARCHAR and omitting the length.
To compare, try another dialog: in the Create table, try to create some
table with the same name as an existing table. In this case, the dialog
receives the error message and I'm able to correct my mistake.