Re: WTF bug ID

[John W. Eaton]

On 12/20/2014 06:53 AM, Philipp Kutin wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 6:31 PM, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I remember being unhappy about having that implemented at the time, but whatever.  I had 
> > added a note at the bottom of the docstring for error to try and warn people about this 
> > ("two or more input arguments")
>
> While the behavior is somewhat strange, there's a certain logic to it.
> Since in the M language, escapes like '\n' have no meaning at the
> lexical level and are merely interpreted by sprintf() and the like at
> runtime, a mnemonic for error() usage can be that for more than one
> inarg, the first one is a format string, and it's plain otherwise.

Then why not just ALWAYS pass the format string through sprintf?  That 
would be a much simpler rule.

But even if we agree that it makes sense that the presence of extra 
arguments controls whether sprintf-style formatting is used, it seems 
really strange that the error ID counts as an extra argument.

And don't even get me started on how the error ID detection works...

:-)

jwe