Wapsi Square Forum

I just ran across these two links today, and laughed myself silly reading the various error messages that have been collected into those.

Enjoy:

http://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/a- ... essages/1/

http://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/we ... essages/1/

My favorite was "Non-acceptable error".

I first encountered this in an IBM manual. A couple years later I actually got it.

What's disconcerting is how it implies that other errors are acceptable.

(But then, even in my Cobol-programming days I was an error-message purist. In Cobol, with the compilers we had, copying a value from a 10-character string variable to a 9-character string variable got a warning message, and we had programs with THOUSANDS of that message - code I wrote had no such warnings. More than once when working on old code I discovered that the problem was that ONE of those warnings actually mattered - and when they didn't matter they made it hard to find the more serious messages that did.)

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Some of those error messages looked like something a programmer had intended to get back to and finish up, but for some reason never did.

A trick I used often was a very distinctive string - QQQQQ. I'd put it (usually) at the start of a comment, at a point where I intended to come back and finish up some detail, generally along with a brief explanation of what wasn't done. This made the point easy to find; and then when I though I was done with a project I'd do a global search for that string. Also, if I was taken off a project for some reason, I could easily tell the person inheriting my work how to find those spots.

my favorite error message was on a Linux beta: "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave"