Jira (PUP-4047) consider 'non productive expression' to be warning

[Henrik Lindberg (JIRA)]

Title: Message Title

Henrik Lindberg commented on PUP-4047   Re: consider 'non productive _expression_' to be warning Puppet does make a distinction between warnings and errors, we can change the errors to warnings easily (and it is also easy to make them configurable). In the past we have erred on the side of being too permissive and people keep asking about having a strict mode. Being relaxed leads to sloppy, buggy programs. While I agree that this is a "linting" kind of thing, it has the unfortunate side effect of accepting gibberish programs: [1,2,3] [4,5,6] 1 2 3 ooops would be a valid Puppet Program if the validations are removed. Before we had this validation, we found that we made mistakes/typos that were not caught and it was difficult to spot the error (typically punctuation missing somewhere, a whitespace in the wrong place, a missing brace/bracket (while still having them balanced), etc.). Now, should we treat some expressions that have no effect differently? I am not so sure that is a good idea. The one possibly valid use case so far is the "commenting out the body of an if when debugging" case - I would argue that you can just as well comment out the entire if _expression_ (note that if the test _expression_ has effect; assigns to variable, makes a call or invokes any other _expression_ that may changes system state, then, conservatively the if _expression_ is considered to have effect, also, if there is an else part and it has effect, the "then part" can be empty). I think the very small cost of commenting out an extra line or two is a price worth paying since having the validation raise an error is likely to catch real mistakes in areas that those that are the least familiar with the language will make (and have a hard time finding the cause of), and will catch typos for the rest of us without having to search logs, turn on debugging flags etc. to find those problems. Add Comment   This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v6.3.10#6340-sha1:7ea293a) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Bugs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to puppet-bugs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to puppet-bugs@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-bugs. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.