MPW C Error Messages

Those of us who've been programming the Mac for a few years have some fond memories of the old Macintosh Programmer's Workbench (MPW). It was very much like the Terminal Window on OS X, but had a few quirks of its own.

Among those quirks were the error messages that the C compiler would give you for certain errors. Messages like, "a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program," and "String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that's 3 more than ANSI said I should)" almost made you want to write broken code just to see what the compiler had to say.

The most complete list of the error messages I could find is here.

Well, rumor has it that there's a skunk works at Apple who are busy porting some of these error messages into XCode 2.0. And they say that Apple have lost their sense of humor...

 

Rick

Currently playing in iTunes: Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 01, 2005
  Rick Schaut digs up some of the cool MPW C Error messages. You haven't lived if you never compiled a substantial MacApp-based application on a 8 MHZ 68000-based Mac. Upgrading to a 16MHZ 68030 machine helped, but you could still...
• Anonymous
  April 01, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  April 17, 2005
  Those error messages brought back some old memories. I loved that compiler. Apple was trying to get in shape for some time and was not in a mood for such goodies. Good to here they are getting their old self in XCode 2.0.
• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  PingBack from http://www.livejournal.com/users/themoniker/20591.html
• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
  PingBack from http://www.ljseek.com/funny-error-messages_13779852.html