Re: TODO - COPY_PIPMAK_TERMINAL_TO_STDOUT

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

Aidan Gauland wrote:
>  I've addressed the To Do item "Add a way to enable the
> COPY_PIPMAK_TERMINAL_TO_STDOUT flag at run time", and committed my  
> changes
> (which add to the Pipmak reference).

Cool, thanks!

>  But it would good to have somebody else
> (I'm looking at you Christian ;) ) look at the documentation, to  
> make sure
> that someone other than the programmer who made the changes can  
> understand them.

Looks fine to me (but then I'm a programmer too). Personally I  
wouldn't have seen a need to mention the internal variable name  
(CpyTermToStdout), but I guess it doesn't do any harm.

Some nitpicky comments about the rest:

- Checking the argument with lua_isboolean() is not necessary, as  
every Lua value has a boolean value (nil and false are false,  
everything else is true). By that check, you're unnecessarily  
forbidding use of anything but strictly true and false. I don't think  
it hurts much in this case though, as this function probably isn't  
ever called with a more complex expression than "true" or "false".

- For argument checking (assuming that you want to stop Lua execution  
and not just proceed with a warning), it's better to use the auxiliary  
functions that call lua_error() than just printing a message to the  
terminal, such as luaL_error(), luaL_typerror(), luaL_checknumber()  
etc. (they're not documented, but their source in lauxlib.c is simple  
enough), so that the user gets an indication of where in their code  
the error happens.

- I personally would have used something more human-readable than  
"PmkTerm" to mark the output. (What the heck is a "Pmk"? :) )

>  And does anyone else want Pipmak's error messages to go to stderr  
> as well?
> I'm still thinking of an easy to make Pipmak do this.

What exactly do you mean by error messages? Those that go through  
errorMessage()? They generally mean that Pipmak doesn't run at all,  
and since Pipmak runs for me, I never see them anyway. Those on the  
terminal? We already have them on stdout, thanks to your addition. And  
since Pipmak isn't a noninteractive tool that I call in a shell script  
or something, I see no need to differentiate between stdout and  
stderr. So, no, I personally don't.

   -Christian