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=head1 TITLE
Improvement needed in error messages (both internal errors and die function).
=head1 VERSION
Maintainer: S. A. Janet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 30 Sep 2000
Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Number: 359
Version: 1
Status: Developing
=head1 ABSTRACT
Error messages should contain the word `ERROR' in them. Messages due
to internal errors should contain `INTERNAL ERROR'.
Error messages should also contain the program name, or if that is not
known, the word `perl'.
=head1 DESCRIPTION
Internal error messages should be improved. For example,
% perl -le 'print "PRIME" if (1 x shift) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/'
373403020102920303
Out of memory!
is a poor message. This is better: "perl: FATAL ERROR: out of memory".
=head1 IMPLEMENTATION
This should require very minor improvements to die and the addition of
a function e.g. setprogramname() to register the program name internally:
% cat foo.pl
setprogramname( $0 );
die "filenames expected" if ( $#ARGV < 0 );
...
$ perl foo.pl
foo.pl: FATAL ERROR: filenames expected
=head1 REFERENCES
None.