Steinbach wrote:Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
Steinbach's guideline is a well-known maxim in the tech world, but I have a variation on it which is at least as important (and much more serious):
Sherohman wrote:Never report an error condition you don't know how to describe.
There was a time when we had to make due with cryptic error codes, but it's not 1960 any more. Memory, disk, and bandwidth are cheap these days. We can afford to write programs with the ability to report clearly and accurately what has gone wrong rather than requiring the user to look it up in a manual somewhere or, worse, try to guess what happened.
