A follow-up task has been created and will be pushed in 3.8 release:
Greg Bestland
August 23, 2016 at 7:33 PM
(edited)
After discussing with Adam. I think the goal here was to help bubble up a more descriptive error to CQLSH users, which means the CYTHON path is not relevant to the original gaol. While I think it's important to keep error messages consistent across cython/pure paths, I don't view this as a major issue.
I think we should either make the Cython error path consistent in this ticket, or close this ticket with the current fix, and open a separate issue for the Cython path, and prioritize it appropriately.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-9729