From henrik.bengtsson at ucsf.edu  Wed May 13 02:17:22 2015
From: henrik.bengtsson at ucsf.edu (Henrik Bengtsson)
Date: Tue, 12 May 2015 17:17:22 -0700
Subject: [Rd] WISH: A more informative abor message than "aborting ..."
Message-ID: <CAFDcVCTcMbYY5dXtSi07kNp1UVB7OO_aPCoCUq5+-LS58vodKw@mail.gmail.com>

When R aborts ("core dumps"), it outputs:

  "aborting ..."

This message is rather generic and can be hard to track back to R
itself, i.e. it is not always clear whether it is R itself that
aborted or some other piece of code that caused the abort/core dump
and outputted that message.

May I suggest to expand the message to clarify that it is R that
aborts and that make it explicit that it is the very last message that
is generated by R, e.g.

  "An exception occurred that R could not recover from. The R session
is now aborting ..."

The code that needs to be updated is in
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/main/main.c.  Here's a patch for
the above suggestion:

$ svn diff src/main/main.c
Index: src/main/main.c
===================================================================
--- src/main/main.c     (revision 68355)
+++ src/main/main.c     (working copy)
@@ -594,7 +594,7 @@
            }
        }
     }
-    REprintf("aborting ...\n");
+    REprintf("An exception occurred that R could not recover from.
The R session is now aborting ...\n");
     R_CleanTempDir();
     /* now do normal behaviour, e.g. core dump */
     signal(signum, SIG_DFL);

FYI, after signal(), raise(signum) is called and I think that's it from R.

Thanks,

Henrik



[Rd] WISH: A more informative abor message than "aborting ..."
Henrik Bengtsson