I believe the wording goes back to Martin Maechler many moons ago (AFAICT towards the end of the last millennium.)
We might leave it to him to change it? - Peter D. > On 2 Mar 2023, at 19:30 , avi.e.gr...@gmail.com wrote: > > I think if you step back, you can ask what the purpose of an error message > is and who designs it. > > Is the message for the developer or others on their team or something an > end-user knowing nothing about R will see. > > This reminds me a bit of legal mumbo jumbo that turns many reading it off as > it keeps talking about the party of the first part or the plaintiff as > compared to somewhat straighter talk. > > The scenario is that you are comparing two things. Their names are not > things like "target" or "current" so even other programmers not involved in > your code will pause and wonder. > > One view is to use phrases like first and second arguments/lists/whatever. > You might talk about the one on the left (but using LHS is a bit opaque) > versus the one on the right. > > But sometimes it can be too verbose. Sometimes the error message is being > generated not where everything is clear. > > So ideally you could say: > > WARNING Danger Will Robinson. > Comparing two things for equality. > Result finds mismatches. > There were NA found on the (left or right) that were not matched on the > other side. > Number of such found: 2 > > If you had a Systems Engineer write detailed requirements that included > something a bit better than the example and the programmer was able to > supply the data using the words and guidelines, it might fit some needs but > maybe not satisfy other programmers. But there are human factors people > whose job it is to help choose among alternatives and although they may not > choose well, letting a programmer come up with whatever they feel like is > generally worse. > > Yes, in their microcosm centered on a dozen lines of code, "current" and > "target" may have meaning. But are they the intended user of the product? > > -----Original Message----- > From: R-devel <r-devel-boun...@r-project.org> On Behalf Of Antoine Fabri > Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2023 12:23 PM > To: peter dalgaard <pda...@gmail.com> > Cc: R-devel <r-devel@r-project.org> > Subject: Re: [Rd] confusing all.equal output > > Good points. I don't mind the terminology since target and current are the > names of the arguments. As the function is already designed to stop at the > first failing check we might not need to enumerate or count the mismatches, > instead we could have "`NA` found in `target` but not in `current` at > position <FIRST_MISMATCH>" > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel -- Peter Dalgaard, Professor, Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Phone: (+45)38153501 Office: A 4.23 Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
