From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2004-02-20T20:54:31+09:00
Subject: Re: how to raise warning?

Hi --

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, 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.
> > 
> > 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.
[..]
> Maybe there's a better way than Gavin's proposal (more mnemonic
> names like 'warn_with_sourceinfo'. i know this name sucks but you
> get the idea) but for now i prefer it his way:
> warn "You didn't provide such and such"
> warn "You didn't provide such and such", true

I would love to see every case of boolean arguments (like
"methods(true)") disappear from Ruby -- for exactly the reason you've
given, namely that they're hard to understand and remember.  I've
always thought they should be split into separate methods. 


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net