what's the deal with "user error" on fail?

[Iavor S. Diatchki]

hello,
i would say that if you are wanting to report errors to users, you 
should not use "fail" or "error".
you should instead explicitly report the error. 
when i program i typically use "error" in situations that i think are 
imposible,
but if there is a bug one gets a better error messeage.
i don't use fail (well except sometimes implicitly in list comprahensions).
the reason i avoid "fail" is that it seems hackish to me --  it implies 
that every monad
supports errors and this should not be the case. 
not to mention that often the error that needs to be reported is not a 
string.

but to answer your question, i think the motivation behind "user error",
is that this is the user from the perspective of the compiler writer, 
i.e. the programmer.
i think one should think of those errors as analogous to "segmentation 
fault" in C,
or java's "unhandled exceptions", i.e. in a well written program the 
user of the program should never see them,
but they can be useful to the programmers while debugging their code.


David Roundy wrote:

>When one triggers an exception with something like
>
>fail "Error opening file"
>
>The user gets a message like
>
>Fail: user error
>Reason: Error opening file
>
>which is confusing to the user, because it the user's fault.  Is there some
>other way that it is recommended one fail? Or should I be catching
>userErrors at the top level and failing with my own error message?
>  
>


-- 
==================================================
| Iavor S. Diatchki, Ph.D. student               | 
| Department of Computer Science and Engineering |
| School of OGI at OHSU                          |
| http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~diatchki               |
==================================================