On 22 June 2014 17:04, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Why the hell couldn't the computer just have said to set the clock manually, since it couldn't manage to do it itself, instead of some moronic number code?
I know this was a rhetorical question, but:
These days software is expected to be localised into hundreds of different languages. Until that is done, the programmer does not know and must not assume what script/alphabet/language/character set an error might appear in, let alone what words it will contain. It could be a couple of characters of an ideographic script such as Chinese, which can convey a whole sentence in 2 or 3 "letters", or it could be several lines of hundreds of characters in the case of some Polynesian languages with restricted phonemic inventories. (I pick 2 extreme cases to make a point.)
And errors by nature are unexpected. If, say, the system language has not yet been set at this point, then the right thing to do is not to display a message that the user might not be able to read or even copy down - could you write down a message in Japanese? And type it into Google? I speak a little Japanese and I couldn't - but to show a simple number that they could.