Error Messages from Pike

When Pike encounters an error that it can't handle, or finds something suspicious in a program, you may get an error message or a warning. An error message is a piece of text that Pike prints in order to inform you of a problem that has occurred, and that prevents the program from continuing. A warning is like an error message, but is just given as information of a possible problem.

Your program can print its own warnings and error messages, but this chapter is about those that Pike itself prints when it reads and examines your program.

Most warnings are about possible problems with data types. For example, let us assume the following three variable definitions:

mixed m;
string s;
int i;

In that case, the following assignment will give a warning:

The variable m can contain any type of value, but i can only contain integer values, so Pike warns you that there is a possible problem. For example, what would happen if m contains a string?

Warning messages follow the pattern

filename:line-number: Warning: description

so the warning message that is printed will look something like this:

ex3.pike:17: Warning: An expression type mixed
cannot be assigned to a variable of type int.

Warnings and error messages are not printed on the standard output, but on the standard error output. Even if you re-direct the output from a program, the standard error output is usually printed on the screen.

Given the same three variable definitions, this expression gives an error and not just a warning:

The error message looks something like this:

ex3.pike:21:Bad type in assignment.
ex3.pike:21:Expected: int
ex3.pike:21:Got     : string
Pike: Failed to compile script:
Compilation failed.

Error messages are always printed, and will cause the program to terminate. By default, warnings are not printed. They are turned off by default, and you have to turn them on.

To turn on warnings for the code in a certain file, you can add the line

to that file. An alternative is to give the command-line argument -rt to Pike, or -rt to turn on warnings for all files, even those that are used from your program.

You must also give the argument -w to Pike, for Pike to actually print the warnings. An example:

pike -w -rT myprogram.pike

This will print all warnings that Pike is able to generate for the file myprogram.pike, and for all other files (such as modules) that it uses.

It is usually a very good idea to turn on warnings, at least during program development. Why would you not let the computer help you find the bugs in your program?