note
tlm
<blockquote><em><p>
I would say that IMHO there are no trivial error messages...
</p></em></blockquote>
<p>Step back for a second. What you just wrote is about as defensible as the statement "IMHO there are no bugs."
</p>
<p>You want to see a trivial error message? Here, stick this anywhere in your code:
<c>
die "I'm sooo not trivial!";
</c>
A trivial error message or warning is nothing more than a design <em>bug</em>.</p>
<p>
Consider for example the warning
<c>
Useless use of a constant in void context
</c>
If you read the follow-ups to [id://475466], you'll learn that perl has a special check so that this warning is omitted if the constant is 1 or 0, or a few other esoteric values. I don't know about Larry (or whoever coded that particular bit of perl), but I'm <em>sure</em> that if it had been me who coded that I would have missed adding these checks first time around, and only figured that I needed them after seeing how perfectly sound code was suddenly spitting useless warnings. I.e. there is no a priori guarantee that warnings are non-trivial; this is only a function of the skill of the programmer.</p>
<p>My point is that, the flip-side to the OPs observation is the burden on programmers to make their error messages non-trivial, that this also requires work, and that the more skilled you are as a programmer in keeping your error messages non-trivial, the less likely it is that users will ignore them.</p>
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-439528">
<p><small>the lowliest monk</small></p>
</div></div>
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