Bad error messages
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg14087] Bad error messages
- From: David Epstein <dbae at maths.warwick.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 03:15:16 -0400
- Organization: University of Warwick, UK
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
At Warwick University we have a site license for Mathematica which runs off a license server. I don't know the details of how this works or doesn't work, but the license server does seem to collapse quite frequently. If I am using Mathematica when the license server goes down, I get truly bizarre error messages. This was at first totally puzzling and mystifying, particularly as the next time I ran the same program everything would work perfectly. When I wrote to support at wri.com about this (before I diagnosed the reason for the difficulty), I got no response except an automated acknowledgement that my email had been received. It seems to me that WRI should revamp the error message system. If your license is not valid, shouldn't the error message say this rather than come out with arbitrary reports of failures of arbitrary aspects of the system. David Epstein University of Warwick