Re: Dept of Utterly Useless Error Messages

[David G. Miller (aka DaveAtFraud)]

Aaron Konstam  wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 19:50 -0600, David G. Miller wrote:
> > > Timothy Murphy  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