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Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

I was thinking more generally.

Certainly as regards error messages long numerals or alphanumerics are seldom going to be reported correctly. I do wonder how such error messages come to be generated.

Does some development manager tell a team "You can have errot numbers 00000333387000000 to 00000333387999999" while someone else has 00000333388000000 to 00000333388999999?

Are they some sort of mapping? Is the code file given number 00323334, the functions within it numbers starting 0000 and the errors within the functions also given numbers starting 0000 with the error reported as the concatenation?

A better approach would be to use a What 3 Words approach and map them to a short phrase which might be memorable enough for the user to remember and easy to map back to where the error was found. "Out of cheese" might well be a better way.

But there are other issues. Take the situation where the user goes to close the application with unsaved work. There are instances in which the user may reasonably choose to do this, one being that they've made such a bollocks that the easiest thing is just to quit and start again and a prompt which confuses the user into the wrong choice is not helpful.

Another, mentioned here recently is the GIMP prompt about unsaved work. The real issue there is that GIMP's idea of saving is saving work in its own format even if the user used it to edit a JPEG and pnly wants to save the resulting JPEG. In this case the "Quit without saving" option is quite often the one to choose as the user has already opted for the Overwrite or Export options which are the only ones to save as a JPEG. A bit of thought about that would maybe have steered the developers into a unified save function in which .jpg and .xcf were equally valid choices.

Getting that short message unambiguous can be crucial. A notice at a level crossing saying "Wait here while light flash" sounds OK doesn't it? In Yorkshire dialect "while" and "till" can have opposite meanings than expected. "Wait here while lights are flashing" is better.

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