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Postings from June 2022
On Tue, Jun 7, 2022 at 12:56 PM Felipe Gasper <felipe@felipegasper.com>
wrote:
>
> > On Jun 3, 2022, at 16:22, Neil Bowers <neilb@neilb.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Felipe,
> >
> > We discussed part 1 â improving the wording of the wide character
> messages â and agreed that weâd like to see this, and also that it doesnât
> need to go via an RFC.
> >
> > So we encourage you to propose some wording on p5p, and then submit a PR.
> >
> > Weâve marked your Pre-RFC as "N/A" in the tracker. You could start a
> separate Pre-RFC thread if you want to raise the idea of codes for warnings
> and error messages.
>
> Some further thoughts:
>
> Changing the wording of the error message as it stands risks breaking
> preexisting applications. So it seems imprudent to do it without a
> feature/pragma.
>
> Even that aside, the broader issue is that Perlâs warnings & error
> messages can gainfully be made more helpful. Making one change specifically
> for wide-character warnings seems less-good than looking at whether we
> might be able to improve the whole lot.
>
> And so, hereâs a proposal:
>
> -----
>
> # This tells Perl to prefix all of its ânativeâ warnings & exceptions with
> a
> # âhelp codeâ. It will also cause various tweaks to the messages.
> #
> use feature 'helpcodes';
>
> # This normally warns `Wide character in print â¦`.
> # Under the helpcodes feature it will instead warn (note the updated text):
> #
> # HELP-WIDEOUT: Wide character in print (remember to encode!) â¦`
> #
> print "\x{100}";
>
> # This normally dies `Illegal division by zero â¦`.
> # Under the helpcodes feature it will instead die thus:
> #
> # HELP-DIVZERO: Illegal division by zero â¦`
> #
> my $foo = 9 / 0;
>
> -----
>
> The idea is simple: apply the familiar pattern of POSIX error names
> (ENOENT, EPERM, etc.) to Perl. These will be easily searchable in search
> engines, and we can list them in something like perlhelpcodes.pod.
>
> Thoughts?
>
I think it's useful but unfortunately it cannot be protected by a feature
flag, since the error messages will by their nature escape that scope and
cause breakage.
-Dan
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