On 25/09/13 06:29, Walter Bright wrote:
On 9/23/2013 11:38 AM, bearophile wrote:
2) The other improvement I'd like for D error messages and warnings is
to give a
standard error number. This is a simple improvement, but it makes
simpler to
write explanation pages for the errors. The C# compiler and other
compilers have
them.
I used to do that, but again, it was a completely unwanted feature, and
I abandoned it.
It's simple enough to grep for the error message text, and I myself
prefer to do the grep method.
What makes me grumpy is people only want these things when some other
compiler does it, sort of a bandwagon thing.
Grepping the text can be a problem if the output has been localised.
I write GUI wrappers for programs such as Mercurial/Git/Quilt and have
been forced to use the (equivalent) of the grep to obtain details of the
failure of a Mercurial/Git/Quilt command in order to add niceties as
offering a "refresh and retry" option if (say) a quilt push fails
because the repository needs to be refreshed. The reason that I have to
do this is that the error value returned by the commands isn't very
useful (usually just 0 for success and -1 for failure). The downside of
this is that if my user has a locale that uses a language other than
English my greps fail and the user misses out on the added niceties that
would otherwise have been available.
The type of error return value I would have liked to have seen
implemented in programs (I asked for changes but none were forthcoming)
I write wrappers for would be a flag based system (I think that you can
only count on 8 bits in the return value) to indicate the major
characteristics of the failure.
Peter
