Improving error messages

Improving error messages

[Wolfgang Jaehrling]

Hi!

I think that a weak point of Guile are the error messages, which are
often very terse.  This is not much of a problem once you are used to
it and know what the messages refer to, but when I was new to Guile
(and new to Scheme at the same time), this was a major problem for me.
Thus, I decided to try my best to make Guile more newbie-friendly.  At
<http://www.8ung.at/shell/guile.patch> you find a very incomplete
patch, and I would like to know if it goes into the right direction at
all: Is this the kind of stuff you would want?

Cheers,
GNU/Wolfgang


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Re: Improving error messages

[Rob Browning]

Wolfgang Jaehrling <pro-linux@gmx.de> writes:

> I think that a weak point of Guile are the error messages, which are
> often very terse.  This is not much of a problem once you are used to
> it and know what the messages refer to, but when I was new to Guile
> (and new to Scheme at the same time), this was a major problem for me.
> Thus, I decided to try my best to make Guile more newbie-friendly.  At
> <http://www.8ung.at/shell/guile.patch> you find a very incomplete
> patch, and I would like to know if it goes into the right direction at
> all: Is this the kind of stuff you would want?

>From a quick look, it appears pretty good to me.  Though I'd like to
hear what someone more familiar with eval.c thinks.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4


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Re: Improving error messages

[Marius Vollmer]

Wolfgang Jaehrling <pro-linux@gmx.de> writes:

> Thus, I decided to try my best to make Guile more newbie-friendly.  At
> <http://www.8ung.at/shell/guile.patch> you find a very incomplete
> patch, and I would like to know if it goes into the right direction at
> all: Is this the kind of stuff you would want?

Yes, very much!  And even more, we don't need to keep all these
scm_s_expression constants.  They only remove the message text from
the point where the message is issued.  That's a minor nuisance, I'd
say.

Sooo, if you could continue your work, that would be splendid!

(I s'pose there is no problem getting "the papers" from you, right?)

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Re: Improving error messages

[Wolfgang Jaehrling]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 08:48:12PM +0100, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> Yes, very much!  And even more, we don't need to keep all these
> scm_s_expression constants.  They only remove the message text from
> the point where the message is issued.  That's a minor nuisance, I'd
> say.

Thanks for the suggestion.  I like the idea, but the constants are
also declared in eval.h like this:

SCM_API const char scm_s_expression[];

So it seems to me like they are part of the API.  (However, if it ever
becomes feasable to internationalize Guile to provide error messages
in the native language of the user, this aspect of the API would most
likely have to be changed anyway in one way or another.)

Any opinions?

> (I s'pose there is no problem getting "the papers" from you, right?)

If I have a working and complete patch and you say that you like it,
I'll have to contact assign@gnu.org, right?

Cheers,
GNU/Wolfgang


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Re: Improving error messages

[Marius Vollmer]

Wolfgang Jaehrling <pro-linux@gmx.de> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 08:48:12PM +0100, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> > Yes, very much!  And even more, we don't need to keep all these
> > scm_s_expression constants.  They only remove the message text from
> > the point where the message is issued.  That's a minor nuisance, I'd
> > say.
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion.  I like the idea, but the constants are
> also declared in eval.h like this:
> 
> SCM_API const char scm_s_expression[];
> 
> So it seems to me like they are part of the API.

Arghh!  Ok, we need to deprecate them first, but we don't need to use
them in eval.c itself.

> (However, if it ever becomes feasable to internationalize Guile to
> provide error messages in the native language of the user, this
> aspect of the API would most likely have to be changed anyway in one
> way or another.)

I guess the string constants are in the API by accident only.  You
can't do anything sensible with them.

> > (I s'pose there is no problem getting "the papers" from you, right?)
> 
> If I have a working and complete patch and you say that you like it,
> I'll have to contact assign@gnu.org, right?

No, you will be contacted with detailed instructions.  Don't call us,
we call you! :-)

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