Karl Berry wrote: > what is *natural* for compiler-like error messages in our world? \. IMHO.
The section in the GNU standards also specifies the error formatting for "other noninteractive programs": PROGRAM:SOURCE-FILE-NAME:LINENO: MESSAGE Later it also talks about interactive programs and recommends this: SOURCE-FILE-NAME:LINENO: MESSAGE I thought you were discussing this too? When a user is getting an error message from 'msgfmt', and the user is a translator who has never written any code in any programming language, why should the error message she shall see be influenced by the syntax of programming languages? When a user is burning a CD from a description of its TOC stored in a file, and this TOC file has a syntax error, why should the error message use double-quotes and backslash as syntax characters? There are maybe 10 million users of our system and our programs. 9.5 millions at least know URLs, and maybe 1 million knows what %20 means. How many out of the 10 million are C programmers? Bruno
