Formatting rules for exception messages

Florian Weimer fw at deneb.enyo.de
Fri Sep 27 13:23:54 UTC 2019


* mark reinhold:

> 2019/3/25 5:24:37 -0700, Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de>:
>> Are there any guidelines for formatting exception messages?
>> 
>> In particular, I'm interested in the case when the exception message
>> is a (clipped) sentence.  Is it supposed to start with a capital
>> letter?
>> 
>> If the message refers to a parameter name, the spelling should reflect
>> the name exactly, of course.  There seems to be a slight bias towards
>> capitalization, based on a few greps.  ...
>
> The first word of any exception message in code that I’ve written, or
> reviewed, is always capitalized unless that word conveys case-sensitive
> technical information (e.g., a parameter name, as you mentioned).  This
> improves readability, especially in longer exception messages that
> contain additional punctuation characters.

Thank you for confirming my observation.  Would it make sense to have
these rules documented somewhere?


More information about the core-libs-dev mailing list