value of documenting error messages?

[Simon Peyton Jones]

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

I don't think so.  If the compiler prints "E0119" and I search for that, I know I'm going to get exactly that, not similar but subtly different things. (A free text search might also throw up illuminating info, but is much less precise.)

Simon

|  -----Original Message-----
|  From: ghc-devs <ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Tom Ellis
|  Sent: 02 June 2021 11:46
|  To: ghc-devs at haskell.org
|  Subject: Re: value of documenting error messages?
|  
|  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
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