Dept of Utterly Useless Error Messages

[Tim]

On Mon, 2007-04-30 at 17:36 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> Ah, if we are gonna dig up errors from the good old days,
> my favorite was always the IBM JCL error something like:
> 
> IEF020I DCB ERROPT=ABE and/or no SYNAD exit specified.
> 
> When you looked it up in the trusty messages and codes
> manual, you'd get the vastly improved version:
> 
> IEF020I The DCB ERROPT was set to ABE and/o no SYNAD exit
> was specified. Programmer action: Correct error and
> resubmit job. 

Many years ago, on a computer far away ;-) we had a Data General
mainframe that would give you two lines worth of error report if you
stuffed up.  It'd give you its (very detailed) error message about what
was wrong, and would throw the line back at you that was wrong, with the
cursor sitting at the point in the line the error occurred.  All you had
to do was fix your typing and press enter.

Sodding personal computers, on the other hand, would just say SYNTAX
ERROR, and leave you scratching your head.  At least my old Amiga had a
"why" command.  If you didn't understand the previous short error
message, typing in "why" would give you a more lengthy explanation of
the error.  It saved you digging out a manual.

-- 
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