On Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 09:23:04AM -0800, Iavor S. Diatchki wrote:
i would say that if you are wanting to report errors to users, you should not use "fail" or "error". you should instead explicitly report the error.
And how does one explicitly report an error? I would normally do it by implementing something functionally equivalent to fail. Why not let fail serve this purpose?
but to answer your question, i think the motivation behind "user error", is that this is the user from the perspective of the compiler writer, i.e. the programmer. i think one should think of those errors as analogous to "segmentation fault" in C, or java's "unhandled exceptions", i.e. in a well written program the user of the program should never see them, but they can be useful to the programmers while debugging their code.
I guess it seems like a better term than "user error" could be come up with, since most users thing that it means them. Assuming I don't use it for normal errors (the sort that "should" happen), then the only time they'll see this message is when I have a bug in my code. When that happens I'd much rather have them see something like "bug" or "programmer error" so they'll report it, rather than user error, which makes them wonder if they did something wrong. -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org