On 1 December 2011 12:26, Stewart, Robert <Robert.Stewart@sig.com> wrote:
I'm astounded at this line of thought, Dean. When choosing between two courses of action with reasonably equivalent outcomes, surely the one with the least cost is better. Thus, if using a library that is prone to triggering horrible error messages when misused is compared against using another library this does not trigger such error messages when misused, the choice is clear.
But the way people avoid the hard to read error messages is to move the error detection to runtime, where it is easy to control the error messages. Unfortunately, error detection at runtime is usually much less thorough (as it is both hard to do and people don't want to incur the cost in correct code) and hence much more expensive. The choice is between hard to read errors found early vs. (typically) much less thorough error checking found later. To me, the choice is clear, in that I want to find as many errors as possible at compile time, even if those error messages are painful to understand and compile times are noticeably increased. -- Nevin ":-)" Liber <mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com> (847) 691-1404