Obsequious programsOnce upon a time I wrote a line printer plotting package which had what may have been the most obsequious error messages of all time. Typical messages ran like this Honored and revered sir, this unworthy program is desolated to inform you that it can not properly use your range coordinate of -37. The base and thoughtless programmer who composed this program has restricted it to values lying between 0 and 100.The program, which was written in fortran, was about 80% format statements. As I recall people used to deliberately run jobs with errors in them just to see what the diagnostics would be. This page was last updated October 1, 2005. |