Front page | perl.perl6.language.strict |
Postings from February 2001
Something I think Ed mentioned in passing a few days ago has been
running around in my mind and after some contemplation I think its
changed my mind on all this.
My position has been that warnings are ultimately good, but people who
have not internalized this will easily become annoyed with them and
switch them off. This is based on my particular observations and
speculations. But ultimately, its just an opinion.
Ed says by putting warnings right in a user's face, it'll make them
more aware of their existance and they'll more quickly come to see
their benefits. As with mine, its an opinion.
If this was the Software Engineering Institute, we'd setup a big study
to find out if new programmers learning Perl on their own find default
run-time warnings beneficial. But we're not the SEI.
But we can run an experiment. Warnings can be made default for the
first few releases of Perl 6 and we'll see what happens. If it looks
good, leave them on. If not, shut them off. Unlike most other
features, this one doesn't have any serious backwards compatibility
consequences! -w, -W and -X will still all work the same, C<use
warnings> and C<no warnings> will still be the same. Programs
will still run the same (baring Deep Mucking with $SIG{__WARN__}).
So I say, sure! Let's give it a shot and see what happens. I hope it
turns out that I'm wrong and Ed is right.
--
Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Perl6 Quality Assurance <perl-qa@perl.org> Kwalitee Is Job One