From maintainers-request at octave dot org Wed Dec  7 03:07:24 2005
Subject: Re: message ids for warnings and errors
From: Stefan van der Walt <stefan at sun dot ac dot za>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Cc: Bill Denney <denney at seas dot upenn dot edu>, maintainers@octave.org
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 11:11:47 +0200

On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 05:39:49PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On  6-Dec-2005, Bill Denney wrote:
> 
> | On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Stefan van der Walt wrote:
> | 
> | > 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.
> | 
> | That looks like what I see as well.  These identifiers are written in by 
> | the coders of the individual functions (you can add one yourself as part 
> | of your warning).  I would say that the warning types should be added as 
> | they are found, and I don't think that they are standard.
> 
> Yes, I'm not proposing that we implement them all at once, even if we
> could find a list.  I was more interested in seeing whether there was
> a uniform naming scheme and about how many there are.

It's just as well.  I found a list by grepping through the MATLAB
m-files (one that I obviously can't publish here) -- it contains more
than 2000 warnings.  These include very specific warnings like
MATLAB:cell2mat:NoInputs.

I don't see any way we can implement all these, given that we're not
allowed to look at the MATLAB source and the narrow scope they have.

Stéfan