Yes, providing good error message is a hard problem. Writing a parser that just bails out when it encounters and error is easy. Writing one that provides error messages that are useful to the user is a _lot_ more work. That's a dimension I didn't touch on in the article.
I would be interesting to do a follow-up to this post where I compare the error handling for some common libraries/programs and ask the authors on what trade-offs the faced when designing error handling. It's a subject, I beliveve, that is often overlooked.
I would be interesting to do a follow-up to this post where I compare the error handling for some common libraries/programs and ask the authors on what trade-offs the faced when designing error handling. It's a subject, I beliveve, that is often overlooked.