value of documenting error messages?

[Tom Ellis]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 03:40:57PM -0700, Alec Theriault wrote:
> Rust has taken an interesting approach for this: every error message is
> given a unique number like "E0119"

Is there a particularly strong reason to use numbers as codes when we
have the entire space human-readable strings available to us?  Even
the subset of case-insensitive strings formed from alphanumeric
characters plus underscore seems more suitable for the encoding than
positive integers.

e.g. "conflicting_trait_implementations" seems better than "E0119"

Tom