On 2019-01-29 13:44, Nick Coghlan wrote: > On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 14:47, Stephen J. Turnbull > <turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote: >> I don't disagree. I disagree with the conclusion that it's worth the >> effort to try to improve all error messages that confuse new users, >> because new users (by definition) don't know enough to respond >> usefully in many cases. In those cases, they need to be told what's >> going on and why, where more experienced users can figure it out from >> their background knowledge of Python semantics. Embedding a "theory >> of operations" note in every error message would be possible, but I >> don't think it's a good idea -- it would certainly make the language >> more annoying for experienced developers. > > FWIW, we have pretty decent evidence that error messages don't have to > provide a wonderful explanation on their own in order to be helpful: > they just need to be distinctive enough that a web search will > reliably get you to a page that gives you relevant information. > > Pre-seeded answers on Stack Overflow are excellent for handling the > second half of that approach (see [1] for a specific example). > > Cheers, > Nick. > > [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25445439/what-does-syntaxerror-missing-parentheses-in-call-to-print-mean-in-python > I have a vague recollection that a certain computer system (Amiga?) had a 'why' command. If it reported an error, you could type "why" and it would give you more details. I suspect that all that was happening was that when the error occurred it would store the additional details somewhere that the 'why' command would simply retrieve.
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