Re: Dept of Utterly Useless Error Messages

Aaron Konstam <akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 19:50 -0600, David G. Miller wrote:
> Timothy Murphy <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > When I run xpdf I get the message "Warning: Attempt to remove > > nonexistent passive grab". The program seems to run in spite of this. > > I googled for the message, with a number of hits, but none had any > > suggestion of a solution, or a cause. Developers who introduce warning > > messages like this should be sentenced to read the complete works of > > Kim Jong Il.
> Oh, come on. I remember a fellow getting the message "Error in source > deck." from a programming class way back when (?? ALGOL on in an IBM > System/370 ??).
> > Now that's a utterly useless error message.
>
That is fascinating. How did you represent an up arrow in EBCDIC? Not to
mention the other non-EBCDIC symbols in Algol. Has anyone ever used a C
compiler on a 370. It is a riot.
This was during my undergraduate days in the late 1970s. It came up when the survey of languages class covered ALGOL. That's about all I remember about both the error and the class!

Cheers,
Dave

--
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce

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