pf » Spelling Strikes Again

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out why I kept getting this error:

"Element CACHE is undefined in APPPLICATION."

My first thought was that somehow the CACHE variable was being deleted from the application structure, somewhere in the code. It didn't make any sense all my other application variables worked just fine.

Finally I realized that I had spelled APPLICATION with 3 P's!

The tricky part about debugging this one was that the line of code that had the typo was only executed on certain conditions.

So how many times have you made a similar mistake? I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of all my debugging is due to typo's.

I think there is actually some room here for a better error message for this type of exception in ColdFusion. The way the error message is written you would think that CACHE is the problem not APPPLICATION. Maybe something like this would be better:

APPPLICATION is undefined. Please check the spelling.

I'm not trying to blame ColdFusion for my mistake, just suggesting an area where error messages could be improved. Error messages almost always have room for improvement.