On Fri, 2021-02-26 at 13:53 -0400, George N. White III wrote:
At some point, RFC's need to address error reporting and
diagnostics.
There is also Java, which spews out 10^2 lines of tracing data with
nothing to highlight the line that has the key to the problem.
I suspect the compiler work was driven by academia wanting to reduce
the amount of time wasted in student training to deal with useless
error messages.
With much of linux development being done by companies that sell
support, better error reporting would make it easier for
organizations to decide they don't need to pay for support.
I remember one of our lecturers are college commenting how their Data
General mainframe put out such a large amount of information in the
error messages that it's almost too user friendly.
However, as well as the explanatory comment that you could actually
read and understand, it would pop up the offending line of code with
the error and park the cursor either at the last point it could cope
with, or the first point it objected to (I can't remember back 25+
years). It did make it a lot easier to debug than computers that spew
up: error #456.865 your turn, now...
Reminds me of the opaque error code that a friend's Windows computer
spewed up when it fell into a nervous breakdown during an attempted
update, and nothing further could be done with it until we fixed the
unknowable error. We had to look up the code on another computer, and
all the damn thing wanted was for us to correctly set the clock. It
could have said that. It could have set the clock itself, it was
online (and if windows used GMT/UTC it wouldn't matter what the
timezone was).
--
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Linux 3.10.0-1160.15.2.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Feb 3 15:06:38 UTC 2021 x86_64
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