On 27 March 2011 18:37, evan.raskob [lists] <lists_at_lowfrequency.org> wrote:
> Oh this is a big pet peeve of mine. (Error messages, that is)
> Terrible, terrible. They are designed to tell humans about potential
> mistakes, but written in a language more suited for a computer. They are
> written in that passive-case, "engineering speak" that tried to sound
> efficient but really talks around what it is trying to say. "Syntax error
> could not find matching }" could easily have been "You have an open {
> without a } to match it - perhaps one is missing somewhere around line 20?"
> if written by a human with an understanding of written (human) language and,
> even more important, compassion and base-level empathy for other lesser,
> imperfect humans who might possibly make an error.
Yes so true, it seems error messages and warnings (which are often
errors too) are the last thing that compiler writers think about. I
guess it is difficult to get right, we pretend to write meaningful
programs but so much that is meaningful, like variable names,
commentary, spatial arrangement etc is ignored by the compiler. So it
really has little to go on in trying to work out what you were trying
to do.
I think the worst error reporting I've seen is in processing, an
environment designed for teaching programming to artists. You get a
tiny output window, and a massive stacktrace, most of which is
irrelevant. So you have to scroll up reams of nonsense looking for
the tiny relevant bit at the top. If you have multiple tabs you'll
probably be directed to the wrong place anyway. They chose to base it
on Java for good reasons I'm sure, but the error messages are a
definite drawback.
I guess the best error reporting is in languages like max and pd,
where if syntax is wrong, things just don't connect. Can't be clearer
than that...
alex
--
http://yaxu.org/
Received on Mon Mar 28 2011 - 09:28:37 BST