The most confusing error message

Jonathan M Davis newsgroup.d at jmdavisprog.com
Thu Jan 25 06:58:47 UTC 2018


On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 14:22:59 Meta via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> IMO the error message is not too bad once you understand what's
> going on (which probably means it's really not a good error
> message).

It's not that uncommon for me to see a question in D.Learn where someone is
asking a question about an error message, and I have no idea why the error
message isn't clear. After all, it's saying exactly what's wrong. It's just
that it's saying it in compiler-speak, and when you know less about D or
about the compiler, that tends to be less clear. As such, on some level, the
more you know, the worse you're probably going to be at knowing when an
error message is bad - which makes it all that more critical that folks
report error messages that they think are bad and give suggestions on how
they could be improved.

I know that I've fallen way short on that - in part, because I usually
understand the error messages and don't spend time trying to figure out how
they might be improved, and in part because even when I know that an error
message is poor, I'm usually far more interested in fixing my code and
getting on with life than spending the time to open a bug report. But more
of us need to take the time to open those bug reports if we want the error
messages to improve - or even better, take the time to open a PR to fix
them, but that tends to take a much greater level of knowledge than is
required to report the bad message, and most of us aren't compiler devs.

- Jonathan M Davis



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