[plt-dev] slightly misleading error

From: Anthony Cowley (acowley at seas.upenn.edu)
Date: Fri May 22 15:35:14 EDT 2009

>> How about, "Expression produced 2 values, but the context exected 1."
>
> That doesn't include a printout of the 2 values in question, nor a
> particularly natural place to include them -- at the end of the
> sentence would be misleading (they're not the 1 value the context
> expected), and in the middle would break up the explanation if the
> values took multiple lines to print.

Right, I left that out for the case when the expression source isn't
available. If it is available, then it can be something like,

"Expression (values 'a 'b) produced 2 values, but the context expected 1"

But since the original complaint was the apparent disagreement between
a visible highlighted expression and the apparent subject of the error
sentence, I'm not even sure that printing the expression is so
critical. If this were a command line compilation, then I expect an
error message would be along the lines of,

"Line 8, Column 7: Expression produced 2 values, but the context expected 1."

Or, if the expression, when printed, is reasonably short,

"Line 8, (values 'a 'b): Expression produced 2 values, but the context
expected 1."

Anthony


Posted on the dev mailing list.