Question

Whenever I create a large Mathematica project I run into this problem: Preventing avalanche of runtime errors in Mathematica, i.e., Mathematica’s error message are opaque, archaic, and legion.

The idea then is to disable all of Mathematica’s own error messages and implement type checking and error messages of your own in every Function and Module. However I have not found a simple and efficient way of doing this and end up with, e.g., some function generating an error 20 function calls deep and then get a whole cascade of error messages all the way back up to the main routine.

How would you set up a simple mechanism for this that only generates one error message at the function that experiences the error and a simple list of the chain of function calls?

EDIT: Since it has come up in a couple of answers; I am specifically looking for something lightweight regarding the output it produces (otherwise I could just stick with Mathematica’s error messages) and obviously also lightweight in computational overhead. So while Stack and Trace are definitely light on the overhead, their output in complex projects is not quick to parse and some work needs to be done simplifying it.

Answer 1

YAsI – Yet Another (silly?) Idea …

Re-reading your question …

The idea then is to disable all of Mathematica’s own error messages and implement type checking and error messages of your own in every Function and Module.

Found this:

$MessagePrePrint = ( #; Print[Stack[_][[;; -5]]]; Abort[]) &  

v[x_, y_] := w[x, y];
w[x_, y_] := x/y;

StackComplete@v[1, 0];

During evaluation of In[267]:= {StackComplete[v[1,0]];,
          StackComplete[v[1,0]], v[1,0], w[1,0], 1/0, 1/0, Message[Power::infy,1/0]}

Out[267]= $Aborted

conclusion … Aborts at first message and leaves a “reasonable” stack trace. “Reasonable” means “Should be improved”.

But it is completely non-intrusive!