Error message Comment

[BobG]

Congratulations,
You are the first developer I know that puts out error messages in the
form:
Expected <whatever>, Found <what's wrong>.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I've been arguing for this for years.

Most error messages simply say roughly "You did something wrong"! This
does not give the user enough info to correct the error; this format
does!
In order to test for an error, a developer must know what they're
expecting in the test and compare it to some user input.

I enjoyed seeing:
Not enough arguments passed to square, expecting 1, found 0


Also, and specific to most Logo's, a CLEAR message about a list error:
Unterminated list literal, missing ']'

Again, Congratulations, for respecting the user.

Bob

[Dan Sanderson]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 8:23 AM, BobG <bgo...@kncell.org> wrote:

Congratulations,
You are the first developer I know that puts out error messages in the
form:
Expected <whatever>, Found <what's wrong>.

:)  Thanks!

There's still some room for improvement in Cologo's error messages.  For errors in procedures, I'd love for messages to include the row and column number of the offending cell, for instance.

There are also a handful of spreadsheet parsing conditions that intentionally have silent behavior (there are no "compile errors" in Cologo), but could emit or store useful warnings, such as when a spreadsheet appears to define two procedures with the same name.  When a cell that looks like a procedure label is disqualified as such for one of several possible reasons, I'd like Cologo to remember so that the "I don't know how to blah" error message can also say, "...but I did see something that looked like blah at cell X:Y, which was ignored because xyz..."

-- Dan

[Pavel]

Bob, Elica does this since 2003.