[Rd] confusing all.equal output

[peter dalgaard]

I believe the wording goes back to Martin Maechler many moons ago (AFAICT towards the end of the last millennium.)

We might leave it to him to change it?

- Peter D.

> On 2 Mar 2023, at 19:30 , avi.e.gross using gmail.com wrote:
> 
> I think if you step back, you can ask what the purpose of an error message
> is and who designs it.
> 
> Is the message for the developer or others on their team or something an
> end-user knowing nothing about R will see.
> 
> This reminds me a bit of legal mumbo jumbo that turns many reading it off as
> it keeps talking about the party of the first part or the plaintiff as
> compared to somewhat straighter talk.
> 
> The scenario is that you are comparing two things. Their names are not
> things like "target" or "current" so even other programmers not involved in
> your code will pause and wonder.
> 
> One view is to use phrases like first and second arguments/lists/whatever.
> You might talk about the one on the left (but using LHS is a bit opaque)
> versus the one on the right. 
> 
> But sometimes it can be too verbose. Sometimes the error message is being
> generated not where everything is clear.
> 
> So ideally you could say:
> 
> WARNING Danger Will Robinson.
> Comparing two things for equality.
> Result finds mismatches.
> There were NA found on the (left or right) that were not matched on the
> other side.
> Number of such found: 2
> 
> If you had a Systems Engineer write detailed requirements that included
> something a bit better than the example and the programmer was able to
> supply the data using the words and guidelines, it might fit some needs but
> maybe not satisfy other programmers. But there are human factors people
> whose job it is to help choose among alternatives and although they may not
> choose well, letting a programmer come up with whatever they feel like is
> generally worse. 
> 
> Yes, in their microcosm centered on a dozen lines of code, "current" and
> "target" may have meaning. But are they the intended user of the product?
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: R-devel <r-devel-bounces using r-project.org> On Behalf Of Antoine Fabri
> Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2023 12:23 PM
> To: peter dalgaard <pdalgd using gmail.com>
> Cc: R-devel <r-devel using r-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [Rd] confusing all.equal output
> 
> Good points. I don't mind the terminology since target and current are the
> names of the arguments. As the function is already designed to stop at the
> first failing check we might not need to enumerate or count the mismatches,
> instead we could have "`NA` found in `target` but not in `current` at
> position <FIRST_MISMATCH>"
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
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