[racket-dev] guidelines on error messages -- please send feedback

The choice of "variable" is motivated by students and the desire to align
with terms they know from high school math.   The distinction between
variable and identifier is too subtle for many students.

Kathi

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 3:13 PM, Jay McCarthy <jay.mccarthy at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Use ‘argument’ for actual arguments and ‘variable’ for formal
> arguments and in the body of the definition."
>
> I prefer argument and parameter name, because until ASL, they don't
> vary. But it seems you prefer just variable, because you don't want
> two terms for the things made by 'define' and the things made by
> 'lambda'? This is very bikesheddy, but I dislike your choice.
>
> Jay
>
> 2011/6/3 Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu>:
> > Guillaume, Kathi and I have created a set of guidelines for writing
> > error messages for *SL.  For consistency, these guidelines need to be
> > used also by authors of libraries including Teachpacks, etc.  These
> > guidelines are currently being applied to all the error messages in
> > *SL in the core distribution.
> >
> > Please review these guidelines and let us know if anything is
> > unclear.  We'd like to hear back from you within a week, by
> >
> > Fri, June 10
> >
> > We have had to compromise on the description a little to make
> > everything fit into a small number of pages, which we did because we
> > really do hope people will print these out and put them on the wall or
> > next to their monitor to refer to while writing code.  Therefore,
> > lengthy descriptions are out.
> >
> > In particular, rationale is also out.  If you are curious about the
> > rationales for any of these things, please do ask.
> >
> > After this is settled next week, we will send this to users@ and also
> > to edu@ to tell instructors to follow these terms.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Shriram
> >
> > _________________________________________________
> >  For list-related administrative tasks:
> >  http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/dev
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
> Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
> http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay
>
> "The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93
>
>
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