friendly messages

[John A. Ebersold]

In article <1089 at auspex.UUCP> guy at auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes:
>>The consensus seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong.. :-) that error
>>messages should say just enough to please the user and no more.
>
>Yes.  However, one gets the impression that some programmers have a
>quite bogus idea of how much this actually is - often bogusly small.

Yes, like printing errno, instead of the error message.

On a releated topic...

How many times has anyone heard (or said) something like.  "I'm not checking
the return value becuase I can't do anything about it anyway."

To me, this is not true.  You can always print a message that says:

Horrible error in program foo, function bar, the function bletch returned a
-1 on about line x.

I'd rather have this than a mysterious failure.

-- 
John A. Ebersold  at  Defense Logistics Agency   osu-cis!dsacg1!dsacg3!vfm6066  
Unify Corporation     System Automation Center   Columbus, Ohio 1-614-238-5923
Me?  Speak for anyone else?  Don't be ridiculous!                  AV 850-5923
Systems with poorly understood requirements cannot be developed in a crunch.