Jeff wrote:
Okay, I can buy that in some circumstances, you want syntax errors to be silently ignored.
No. You are looking at the problem from a programmer perspective, but when these errors are introduced, there is no programmer present. As a matter of fact, the programmers may already have been fired. The person who is translating the text is introducing the errors, and he is the one who needs to be able to see them and fix them. The best way to do that is for the translate/format functions to return a string from which one can deduce that a syntax error has occurred, so that the translator (or the user) can see the error appearing instead of the properly translated text - without this interfering with the user's ability to continue using the software as would happen if an exception aborted the entire, potentially time consuming, operation. This does not "silently ignore" the errors, it reports them in an appropriate way, to the appropriate person. Now, you could make the case that you, as a programmer, should still have the error reported to you by the library so that you can log it (if the library doesn't have built-in logging support), which of course would also allow you to promptly proceed to ignore everything that's been said and make the error handlers throw exceptions. :-)