Since I'm taking a few weeks vacation, I've decided to seriously try to learn rust. My method in this case is to ask ChatGPT to guide me (but not write for me!) a library ("crate") that I've always wanted to write and never got around to.

Of course, I get a lot of feedback on appropriate rust styling, but some of it veers into things I feel are deeper constraints. In this case, I had an open function, which took a struct containing some flags, such as "writeable", "create if didn't exist".

It didn't like the fact that I asserted if you set create and didn't set writeable. Here is my response:

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Re: assert!(). I dislike APIs which allow misuse. Callers of a library should not rely on such checks in the library, in fact the concept of adding an InvalidOptions error type is offensive. A recoverable error is strictly a worse api than an unignorable error. But a compile time error is better.

We should use an enum READONLY, WRITE_MUST_EXIST, WRITE_MAY_CREATE.

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Of course, it's a waste of time for me to lecture it on style, but I can't help myself!!