Parameter correctness
What really upsets me about the parameter system is that there is no check on the
validity of the parameters, so any typos are not easily spotted and changes
can only be really checked by looking in the used_parameters.yml
file, since
we also do not report all parameters to the log (even then the output is very
busy so easily overlooked).
What we should do is have a list of recognised parameters that are understood
and warn when ones are encountered that are not in this list. In the absence
of a full YML parser with schema support, the only way I can think to do that is
pre-parse the parameter_example.yml
, that we maintain with the defaults
documented, and require any locally read values to correspond to one of those.
The file could be either ingested at compile time, or located at runtime. Compile time is more robust, so initially I'd prefer that.