On Saturday, 29 March 2014 at 15:37:05 UTC, w0rp wrote:
I agree with Walter about error numbers being a bad idea.
Especially when people prefer the numbers over a description.
MySQL has really turned me off the idea of error numbers. When
I get an error about MySQL syntax, the message actually reads
like this.
"Error near <snippet> <line number> <column number> ... <error
number>"
It never tells you what kind of syntax error you made, or
*exactly* where it actually happened (The line and column
numbers are misleading.). You just get a message "well it
broke" and an error number which might as well be the result of
a hash function. As a result, I hardly ever look up the error
number, and I just make a guess as to what I did wrong. It's
usually faster to guess.
It's kind of like the effect bug IDs can have on commit
messagses, which I mentioned in another thread. If you put some
ID you can search for in a message, some people have a tendency
to rely on the ID and forget about providing a descriptive
message as well.
I think a better approach is to just describe the error better.
When I use DMD I get some pretty good results already for
errors. We just need to patch messages which may be confusing
at the moment into being more descriptive.
The way Visual C++ does it is that you get *both* and error
number and an error message. Having the error number is very
useful for googling(yes the complete message will give you hits,
but the # is more concise and turns up more hits), and for
quickly referring to a given error.
