R. Clayton (rclayton@monmouth.edu)
(no date)
When there is a difference in one or more memory-resident variables, should
the error message be printed to std-out or std-err?
Send it to std-out. The assignment page has been updated to make it clear.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Does the informative error message for syntactically invalid input go to
std-out or std-err?
Send it to std-err. The assignment page has been updated to make it clear.
Thanks again.
These questions are similar to the discussion we had last Thursday about what
is and is not an exceptional condition. The program for the second assignment
checks if two code blocks represent the same computation; the expected answers
are "yes" or "no". Perhaps the optimizer doesn't expect the answer to be no,
but to the checker either answer's expected. Sending either answer to std-out
seems like a good choice.
On the other hand, the checker assumes the input is syntactically correct. If
the input's not syntactically correct, then something's gone seriously wrong
and sending the error message to std-err seems like the better choice.
On the other hand, these arguments can be easily turned around to reach the
opposite conclusions. In such cases, the answer usually falls to doing
whatever custom dictates (which starts to beg the question, because now you
have to determine what custom is).
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