On Wednesday, 30 January 2013 at 21:07:41 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Wednesday, January 30, 2013 12:40:26 H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 09:03:31PM +0100, rumbu wrote:
> Ok, maybe my thoughts are polluted by some C# programming
> practices,
> but I learnt that exceptions are never intended for the end
> user
> (one of the reasons is that the exception mesages are in
> most cases
> displayed in english language). In Windows world, throwing an
> exception displays a message with a nice two buttons: Close
> and
> Debug. This will make the accountant using my software very
> eager to
> click on Debug :)
Maybe that is accepted convention in the Windows world, but I
consider
exceptions as an excellent way of conveying what went wrong to
the user.
Such as "could not calculate cell value, expecting number in
cell A5 but
got 'adfsdfas' instead". Throwing an exception is the cleanest
way to
abort potentially deeply-nested calculation code and give the
user a
useful message in the meantime. I would hate to manually
propagate such
user errors by hand, just because of the convention that
exception
messages should never be seen by the user!
I would never show an exception to a user, even in Linux. I
might show the
exception's message, but I would never let the exception escape
and end up
showing the stack trace and whatnot to the user. I see no
problem in showing
an exception's message to a user if that's what it was intended
for. The fact
that it was an exception which delivered the message is an
implementation
detail that the user doesn't care about and shouldn't know. But
I suspect that
the two of you pretty much agree about that but are thinking of
different
things when you're talking about "showing the exception to the
user."
- Jonathan M Davis
I would much rather show a stacktrace to the user than "Unknown
error" or some other little usable message. When a user
copy/paste a stacktrace for a hard-to-reproduce problem, it's a
*lot* simpler to fix the error or give a custom error message.
