Charlie,
While I'm as quick as anybody to say RTFM, YDDB (You Dear
Developer
Bastard) to developers with um, Dear Developer Questions,
there are
three issues here that would help deal with this:
* The docs on Forms actually *could* be easier to find
and
navigate. AFAIK, there isn't a "developer's
FAQ". (and if there
is: it's not that well known, or I wouldn't be
writing this,
ja?). This is a good one for such a doc.
* Like it or not, APIs are always abused, either
through
carelessness or ignorance. It's a motherhood in
software
engineering: any function or procedure needs to deal
gracefully
with bad input. And there are many very good
procedures (see:
invariants) to test for bad input. Generally, forms
are not
processed multiple times in a request, and if we can
add code to
form.inc to catch this, it will make the whole system
more
predictable.
* Good "form debugging" tools aren't really
available yet, or are
not that well known to some of us doing 4.7
development. The
arrays created for Forms API are generally static,
and I've found
that there are a variety of ways of detecting
"bad data". A
"forms validate" API could be called via
devel.module or in
debugging code, and would make these kind of bugs a
lot more
transparent.
Yellin' at us dumb developers has its satisfactions, and
you've earned
the right to do it more than most of us. But if the goal is
to reduce
this type of developer problem, there just might be a
technological
solution here 
Rob
Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> You guys do not read the various documentation despite
lots of efforts
> went creating them.
>
> Have you read the form API reference where about every
fifth line is a
> warning about missing # signs? I won't look up the PHP
manual page
> where it mentions that if you omit a key then the key
is actually 0
> and obviously 0 is not something that begins with #.
>
> Also, core does not babysit broken code. But sometimes
developers need
> a crutch. It's provided for quite some time at
> http://drupal.org/node/5
8355 .
>
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