I am no GHC developer, so this is not my place to reply. Even though I humbly would like to put an argument in favor of numbers. On 02-06-21 06:46, Tom Ellis wrote:
On Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 03:40:57PM -0700, Alec Theriault wrote:
Rust has taken an interesting approach for this: every error message is given a unique number like "E0119"
Is there a particularly strong reason to use numbers as codes when we have the entire space human-readable strings available to us? Even the subset of case-insensitive strings formed from alphanumeric characters plus underscore seems more suitable for the encoding than positive integers.
e.g. "conflicting_trait_implementations" seems better than "E0119"
One is SEO-optimization. A number like #0119 on a search string like "ghc error #0119" ought to have as a first result the GHC user docs. This is a great user experience for students. A more general search string can have more results on other languages and is difficult to say we would be first result. Second one is that a number is shorter than a general string. That way we can highlight it on a error message on the terminal without occupying to much space. Current messages in GHC are already too big. -- -- Rubén -- pgp: 4EE9 28F7 932E F4AD