Sunday, October 08, 2006

Memorable Messages

A couple of error messages from 40 years ago have stuck firmly in my memory. The first is one that I actually received from the IBM PL/I F compiler:
ERROR, THE PRECEDING ERROR MESSAGE CONTAINS AN ERROR. PLEASE SUBMIT AN APAR TO YOUR IBM REPRESENTATIVE.
The message was absolutely correct: There was an error in the previous message. (An APAR was an Authorized Program Analysis Report.)

The second is one that wasn't triggered by any of my programs. I noticed it in the list of error messages while looking up another runtime error message from the IBM FORTRAN H compiler:
ERROR, BRANCH TO CODE ELIMINATED BY OPTIMIZER.
Now it could be that these messages were so memorable because I was young and impressionable, but I like to think that it is because of the level of foresight required to recognize that these were problems that could occur in a large, complex compiler, and that they would be easier to track down if they were explicitly reported.

posted by Jim Horning at 5:03 PM

2 Comments:

Comment by Blogger Frank:

I've undoubted told this story before, elsewhere, but it's certainly appropriate here. This wasn't 40 years ago, merely 25, but still.

In those days they were still teaching FORTRAN to non-computer science majors. The university was still running the old CPV operating system on Xerox 560 hardware, and CPV had an "ANS FORTRAN" compiler, ANSF. I had recently started working in the computer center as a support person when a girl from one of those FORTRAN classes came in with an odd problem. She had tried to compile her program and it had gotten an error that she couldn't figure out. She showed us the printout.

It was clear from the output that it was really a compiler error; there was a partial dump, all neatly formatted, and in the middle of the whole things there was the error message:

BREAK ROB'S KNUCKLES

To this day I don't know who Rob was or why his knuckles should be broken. It has been fun to speculate, though.

5:48 PM  
Comment by Anonymous Anonymous:

I recall the Break Rob's Knucles error message as well. It was generated when the subroutine linkage parameter matching process failed under ANS Fortran.

3:33 PM  

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