[Ifeffit] formula checking

[Scott Calvin]

Hi Matt, Bruce, etc.,

I think Matt's suggestion is a very good one. In the past, I have
occasionally run into problems where Ifeffit flags a problem but Artemis
doesn't check for the particular flag. Since when I'm rolling along using
Artemis I don't alsays inspect the Iffefit messages, I didn't realize
anything funny has happened immediately...it wasn't until I realized the
fit didn't make sense that I checked if Ifeffit had correctly identified a
typo or whatever. I've always alerted Bruce when these things have come up,
and he's incorporated them into new releases, but it would be very good if
Ifeffit had a couple of generic warning flags that Artemis could grab on to
and thus prominently alert the user that something went wrong...

--Scott Calvin
Sarah Lawrence College

At 11:08 AM 11/17/2004 -0600, you wrote:
>Hi Bruce, Peter,
>
>Ifeffit does print a warning message about a syntax error on using
>'//'.  But it's completely believable and forgivable that Artemis
>doesn't catch this.  
>
>Bruce, would it help if a flag was set indicating 'syntax error'
>in addition to printing the warning message?  That way you could
>wrap each of the definitions with a perl function that did the
>ifeffit command and check for syntax errors, doing something
>sensible (popping up a warning dialog box, for example) on a
>syntax error.  That might be better than checking for '//' itself,
>because it would detect other syntax errors as well.
>
>A flag meaning 'math error' (as on divide-by-zero or sqrt(-1))
>might be useful too, I suppose....

>