On 9/2/06, Raymond E. Rogers <address@hidden> wrote:Alfredo, Oh, please please; what good is "literate programing" if nobody understands what is said. Known
error outs should automatically tell the user (typically inexperienced) what to do.
Ray
Alfredo Portes wrote: and the > error is shown to the user telling them what is needed. >
I would argue the contrary, that this doesn't always happen. Windows
systems are the best example. What in the world do I do if I get a
window saying:
"unknown error". "error: c456cpetht..." "the system has recovered from a serious error"
That doesn't have to do anything with LP. And type of error messages like this are written by world top programmers.
My point was that I see now two camps in the mailing list. I could be a regular user of Axiom, so my hope will be always to just say "apt-get install axiom" or any other package manager. If I am trying to compile it and I am missing something, then this should be clear. Who has not spent time trying to figure out some dependency because it was not clear what broke at compilation time. (maybe only me, nooby :-) ).
In a perfect world Axiom would not have any dependency, but if it must have it then let the user install it in the system. How hard is to have latex on a system nowdays. I am with Tim in this, regarding that future projects will require latex (browser hyperdoc...). Axiom is in LP style, Latex/Noweb is the current tool in Axiom to achieve this, how can Latex not be a requirement?
I understand that it makes it harder for the testing purposes on other systems, but I think is not that much of a problem as it sounds in this thread. Of course I could be totally wrong, with everybody more experienced than me actually doing the work (easy to talk in the bench) .
I hope that was the problem you were talking about, and not my English. Sorry if I am not clear in my writting (I have only 4 years living in US. Funny enough 4 years ago I was not able to ask for coffee in a restaurant, much less think that I would be able to write suggestions for such a great project like Axiom).