The point I was trying to make is that the compiler error usually tells you one vague thing: you did something wrong. Unfortunately it does not tell you to any useful extent what you did wrong. It could be anything from a simple typo in one line that lead to 42 messages, or you could have a whole host of fundamental flaws, and there are many options in between.

In fact, I think I'm safe in asserting tha the most serious flaws in programming are too subtle to be reported by any automated means, so when you do get a warning or an error, the wisdom my boss meant me to take was this: view this warning as a moment of reflection to consider all that leads to this point and all that follows, and take a moment before you simply change one character in a knee-jerk reflex and re-compile.

For another example, I am reminded of a silly little activity my geek friends and I enjoyed in high-school, when we had gained access to the the first BASIC interpreter we'd seen. The speed of response was positively intoxicating! When we got some code from elsewhere, and received the "syntax error on line nnnn" message, we'd just delete that line and re-run, repeating this process over and over. We were at least sure to never get that particular error again (now that's "de-bugging" ;-), and while the result was often a program reduced to just a handful of lines that did little or nothing, sometimes we'd get some really interesting behaviour which would amuse our adolescent minds for minutes at a time. I don't believe we ever got a correct program out of this process however ;-)

While I was writing this, I noticed a great line from virtualsue in the CB:

Programming is a craft not a religion. It's not all that different from construction work ;-)

I think this is absolutely true, and following that metaphor, consider whether a contractor should simply patch cracks in a wall, or have a look to see if there is a larger problem elsewhere in the building.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser