Dept of Utterly Useless Error Messages

[David G. Miller]

Aaron Konstam <akonstam at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 19:50 -0600, David G. Miller wrote:
>> > Timothy Murphy <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> 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

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