Hi all, PBP p. 134 and 286 advocates the use of a "=head1 DIAGNOSTICS" section. Although this is a bit on the heavy side, I would tend to agree. I'm not sure it would help a lot of users but it makes one feel good (which is why we write module. Right?).
my latest modules confess at 30 different places, carps at 15 places and diplays information at 9 places. One thing is, IMHO, not right in PBP. Putting all the diagnosticsin one POD section is as bad as writing all the documentation after the code. Chances are messages will change, be added and removed and deleted and the documentation will not be updated properly It's a pitty we can't generate pod more dynamically. it would allows us to extract portions from a location and put them in another pod section. I believe it would be better to put the diagnostics in the methods generating them. Better yet, why would we we give a short error message when a longer, more complete message would be more appropriate? or maybe confess/carp should take a short and a long message and disply the first or both depending on some global settings? Some error messages are generated at different places, a distnictive information about the origin might be helpfull. Cheers, Nadim.
