[PATCH] D76833: [CodingStandards] Document coding standard for error and warning messages

[James Henderson via Phabricator via llvm-commits]

jhenderson created this revision.
jhenderson added reviewers: dblaikie, hubert.reinterpretcast, rnk, chandlerc.
Herald added a project: LLVM.

In particular, these messages should start with a lower-case letter and should have no trailing period at the end of the last sentence.

See http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2020-March/140178.html for context.


Repository:
  rG LLVM Github Monorepo

https://reviews.llvm.org/D76833

Files:
  llvm/docs/CodingStandards.rst


Index: llvm/docs/CodingStandards.rst
===================================================================
--- llvm/docs/CodingStandards.rst
+++ llvm/docs/CodingStandards.rst
@@ -320,6 +320,38 @@
   /// Builds a B-tree in order to do foo.  See paper by...
   void example() { ... }
 
+Error and Warning Messages
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+Clear diagnostic messages are important to help users identify and fix issues in
+their inputs. Use succinct but correct English prose that gives the user the
+context needed to understand what went wrong. Also, to match error message
+styles commonly produced by other tools, start the first sentence with a
+lower-case letter, and finish the last sentence without a period.
+
+For example this is a good error message:
+
+.. code-block:: none
+
+  error: file.o: section header 3 is corrupt. Size is 10 when it should be 20
+
+This is a bad message, since it does not provide useful information and uses the
+wrong style:
+
+.. code-block:: none
+
+  error: file.o: Corrupt section header.
+
+If the tool or project does not have existing functions to emit warnings or
+errors, use the error and warning handlers provided in ``Support/WithColor.h``
+to ensure they are printed in the appropriate style, rather than printing to
+stderr directly.
+
+When using ``report_fatal_error``, follow the same standards for the message as
+regular error messages. Assertion messages and ``llvm_unreachable`` calls do not
+necessarily need to follow these same styles as they are automatically
+formatted, and thus these guidelines may not be suitable.
+
 ``#include`` Style
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 


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