From maintainers-request at octave dot org Tue Dec  6 15:28:52 2005
Subject: Re: message ids for warnings and errors
From: Stefan van der Walt <stefan at sun dot ac dot za>
To: maintainers at octave dot org
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 23:32:22 +0200

On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 03:18:50PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> I've started to implement the
> 
>   warning (msgid, fmt, ...)
>   error (msgid, fmt, ...)
> 
> feature.  This will allow us to also do things like
> 
>   warning off MATLAB:divideByZero
> 
> and (probably) eliminate all the warn_* built-in variables.  I would
> rather not tag our warning and error messsages internally with
> "MATLAB:", and I'm not a big fan of StudlyCaps so perhaps we would
> have message IDs like "Octave:divide_by_zero" instead, with a lookup
> table so that this is equivalent to MATLAB:divideByZero (unless we can
> rely on a uniform translation like Octave -> MATLAB and _[a-z] ->
> [A-Z]).  Does anyone know of a comprehensive list of IDs that Matlab
> uses for warnings?

I wonder how consistent they are in the usage of these strings. The
best description I could find is at

http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/matlab_prog/ch12_er7.html#prog_message_identifiers

and it doesn't refer to a list of pre-defined identifiers.

My vote goes for the lookup-table, rather than the string translation.

Regards
Stéfan