Re: gEDA-user: Hm...not much improvement

[al davis <ad106@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 20 September 2006 22:42, Stuart Brorson wrote:
>  I suspect user error, and think he should do some more
> reading and investigating before posting bleats to geda-user.

Even if it is user error, it deserves attention.  Almost 100% of the bug 
reports for gnucap since its beginning have involved some kind of user 
error.  Still, most of the bugs are real.  The error handling portion 
is tested less than the mainline part, yet this is the most important 
part for a beginner.

When programs are designed, there are several internal ways to approach 
error handling.

Programs not using structured exceptions (as in C++ or Java) typically 
require at least as much code for error handling as for the main line 
code, to do a reasonable but not great job.  Truly good error handling 
can take 90% of the code.

Using the structured exceptions (try, throw, catch in C++ and Java, or 
you can make it with setjmp and longjmp in C, but you need to make it) 
can cut this down significantly, perhaps to 10% of the code to do a 
good job, maybe 1% to get by.

Back to the original comment, and to address the "beginner friendly" 
vs. "expert friendly" issue ....   Good error handling is nice for 
experts, but critical for beginners.  It is not a tradeoff of beginner 
friendly vs. expert friendly.  A truly beginner friendly program will 
help the beginner become an expert.  Unfortunately, too often, 
the "help" only gets in the way.


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