When injured, I often use the phrase "Well, learning occurred". I just spent the last day chasing a circular reference problem in the meta-object protocol (MOP) which is the basis of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). It turns out that the "circular reference" is a REALLY bad error message. It won't bore you with the deails but it the usual "Wow, I found a bug in the system" thing.
But I'm too experienced ("old") to believe that. After a day of creating ever-smaller versions of the input I finally cornered it. That's when I found a one-line paragraph in the MOP that tells me when "finalize-inheritance" will be called. After much Omphaloskepsis I translated that to "that's obvious, so it must be my bug"... (spoiler alert) ... which it was. Well, learning occurred. So I'm going to concentrate REALLY hard on making Sane give, not only an error message, but a likely thing to check. The error message should also include references into the literate documentation for a deeper explanation. Tim _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer