On Sun, 03 Nov 2013 21:03:02 +0100, Luc Maisonobe wrote:
Le 03/11/2013 20:17, Ted Dunning a écrit :
On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Luc Maisonobe <l...@spaceroots.org>
wrote:
I had proposed that error messages be incrementally built from
simple
"base" patterns, to be assembled either at the point where the
exception
is going to be thrown or inside specific exceptions[2] (or a
combination
of both).
It often doesn't work. Sentences constructions are completely
different
in different languages, and it is impossible to simply buid up from
elementary components that are individually translated and
assembled
later. See all the documentation about the ancient gettext for
example.
I think that a message good enough to convey the cause of the failure
can
in many cases be built from such blocks. I concede that it may not be
perfectly formulated in a natural language, but even if it where, the
error
message are _rarely_ if ever clear, an one needs to refer to the
apidocs
in order to understand what caused the exception. There the error
condition
is hopefully (as it should) explained in a nice and clear sentences.
There are drawbacks in having these hundreds of messages patterns.
Modern printf implementations deal with this by numbered arguments.
This
is not a problem any more.
Which means you have a complete message with a sentence that simply
has
placeholders for variables parts. What I understand about Gilles
proposal is to go further in the way of small blocks like
COLUMN_INDEX,
CONSTRAINT, EVALUATION, INDEX, NORM, and build up from there. Is it
what
was initially meant?
Not sure I understand what you wrote. But, yes; where a juxtaposition
of
the blocks is good enough, we could readily use it. That will reduce
the list
quite substantially. When we get rid of all the similar patterns, it
will be
more acceptable to keep a few longer patters where really necessary.
Regards,
Gilles
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