MRAB schrieb am 29.01.19 um 19:55:
On 2019-01-29 13:44, Nick Coghlan wrote:
FWIW, we have pretty decent evidence that error messages don't have to provide a wonderful explanation on their own in order to be helpful: they just need to be distinctive enough that a web search will reliably get you to a page that gives you relevant information.
Pre-seeded answers on Stack Overflow are excellent for handling the second half of that approach (see [1] for a specific example). [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25445439/what-does-syntaxerror-missing-p...
I have a vague recollection that a certain computer system (Amiga?) had a 'why' command. If it reported an error, you could type "why" and it would give you more details.
I suspect that all that was happening was that when the error occurred it would store the additional details somewhere that the 'why' command would simply retrieve.
So … are you suggesting to use the webbrowser module inside of the REPL to look up the exception message of the previously printed stack trace in stack overflow when a user types "why()"? I faintly recall someone implementing something in that direction. It's probably in some package on PyPI. Stefan