[Bioc-devel] best practice: verbose messages

[Dan Tenenbaum]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Kasper Daniel Hansen
<kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Dan Tenenbaum <dtenenba at fhcrc.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Michael Lawrence
>> <lawrence.michael at gene.com> wrote:
>> > If it's an informational message, like one you might log, use message().
>> > If
>> > you're rendering an object as text, like in a show method, use cat().
>> >
>>
>> Another thing to consider is that messages can be suppressed with
>> suppressMessages() but cat() output cannot.
>
>
> Sure.  What I cannot decide is whether that is good or bad.
>

In terms of being a good citizen, it's good; but sounds like you are
also providing a verbose option that can be turned off (or is off by
default) so that's another path to good citizenship.
However, if your package is at the bottom of a big dependency tree,
the user may not be aware of the package-specific way to suppress
output but they might be aware of suppressMessages().

Up to you....
Dan


> Kasper
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> Dan
>>
>>
>> > Just my opinion,
>> > Michael
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Kasper Daniel Hansen <
>> > kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Should I use cat() or message() (or something else) for
>> >>   if(verbose) cat("my message\n")
>> >>
>> >> Best,
>> >> Kasper
>> >>
>> >>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> Bioc-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
>> >>
>> >
>> >         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
>
>