From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-02-20T17:25:17+09:00
Subject: Re: how to raise warning?


On Feb 19, 2004, at 11:50 PM, Gavri Savio Fernandez wrote:

>> From: Hal Fulton [mailto:hal9000@hypermetrics.com]
>> Subject: Re: how to raise warning?
>>> Having a variant of 'warn' that displays that information would be 
>>> nice IMO.
>>>
>>>   warn "You didn't provide such and such", true
>>
>> Mmm. I would expect that just to print 'true' after the warning.
I second that. Adding an optional boolean argument to the function to 
get different results doesn't quite seem rubyish to me.

>> The problem as I see it is that we use warnings in two ways:
>> 1. As Ruby does, to complain about something happening at a specific
>>     place in the source -- a highly source-related message. In that
>>     case, I'd want to see file/line info (as Ruby does when it says I
>>     need to add parens or something).
>> 2. To complain about some general condition occurring at runtime that
>>     doesn't warrant bailing out of the app.
>>
>> My suggestion: Two names. Call the first one "warning" (the kind of
>> warning that Ruby gives us) and the second one "warn" (a simple verb
>> that just prints to stderr).
>
> One of the main things I like about Ruby is that the names are so 
> intuitive.
> Once i check out a particular class or method in the reference, it is 
> pretty much guaranteed that i won't forget it ever. Even better, 
> sometimes i just guess what the name of a particular entity might be, 
> type it in and the program runs. This, for me, is a major plus for 
> ruby.
> Even if a particular name is esoteric, it is esoteric in a way i 
> remember and find difficult to forget.
>
> Okay, what i'm driving at is this: Naming one method 'warn' (A verb. I 
> like that) and another 'warning' (A noun. Don't like it much) is quite 
> confusing :(
> There doesn't seem to be any clue in their names to differentiate 
> their functionality from each other.

How about:
warn "Server timed out. retrying."
warn! "That number seemed a bit high... Possible error."

This would keep the old behavior for warn(), but add a new function 
warn!(), which would be used for more serious warnings where you want 
to include a traceback.

-Mark