From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <7359f049040603081676be64a6@mail.gmail.com> Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2004 08:16:09 -0700 From: Rob Pike To: lucio@proxima.alt.za, Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] GNU Make In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 939f4084-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > Because there is madness at the end of that road, too? why? > Yes, that is all extremely human-friendly, but one can't invest > infinite amounts of computing power in interpreting error messages > that do not reach the user. Or that the user is going to ignore > anyway. what are you talking about? > Once again, my opinion is that errors ought to be reported as > concisely as possible within ambiguity constrains and that it ought to > be possible to request the additional details separately. But I seem > to be in a minority. as concisely as possible is '23'. are you advocating that? the errors are there *for the user*, not for programs. corrupting a system that works hard -- and mostly successfully -- to deliver clear, helpful, detailed error messages, in order to make some bastard subsystem spend less CPU time *for users accustomed to unhelpful messages* (for such is unix's lot) is perverse. APE can go jump in a lake. -rob