Re: [lmi] "Alert" messages [Was: Code review: product editor]

[Greg Chicares]

On 2007-3-3 5:11 UTC, Greg Chicares wrote:
> 
> The really bizarre one is hobsons_choice(), which makes the
> user decide whether to throw. I'm trying to do away with it.

It occurs less than a dozen times. But one of those occurrences
was in what the LMI_ASSERT macro formerly expanded to, and that
macro occured about four hundred times before the 20070306T1813Z
and 20070309T1627Z changes.

> It feels like INTERCAL.

Now, that expansion has a name that looks like INTERCAL. Here is
INTERCAL documentation for it:
* PLEASE ABSTAIN FROM USING HOPEFULLY

Before 20070306T1813Z, we had
  ASSERT_LMI (threw unconditionally; infrequent)
  LMI_ASSERT (threw at the user's option; very common)

On 20070306T1813Z, we renamed
  s/LMI_ASSERT/HOPEFULLY/
  s/ASSERT_LMI/LMI_ASSERT/

On 20070309T1627Z, we changed many occurrences that didn't need
to offer any option from HOPEFULLY to LMI_ASSERT, so now we have
  LMI_ASSERT (throws unconditionally)
  HOPEFULLY  (throws at the user's option)
and ASSERT_LMI no longer exists. Now dubious behavior corresponds
to a name that, hopefully, betokens dubiety.

This was the simplest way to achieve the most we could for now:
 - recent code that used LMI_ASSERT throws on failure,
     unconditionally, as was presumably its intention,
     and the original macro name has been preserved
     (so, notably, we did no harm to Evgeniy's work);
 - the same goes for old code that had no need to permit
     overriding the exception;
 - old code (in only a few translation units) that might
     need an overridable assertion now uses HOPEFULLY
     instead of LMI_ASSERT; and
 - there's no more ASSERT_LMI to confuse with LMI_ASSERT.

Assertions that formerly could be bypassed have been replaced
with assertions that cannot, in about half of all instances,
but in eighty or ninety percent of source files:

$grep HOPEFULLY *.?pp |wc -l
    185
$grep --files-with-matches HOPEFULLY *.?pp |wc -l
      9
$grep LMI_ASSERT *.?pp |wc -l
    215
$grep --files-with-matches LMI_ASSERT *.?pp |wc -l
     51

> Slowly we are clawing our way back.

Hopefully, as old code is incrementally improved, we can gradually
replace HOPEFULLY with LMI_ASSERT. Probably many instances can be
changed safely now; we can identify them by running with the
"offer_hobsons_choice" configurable setting turned off.