http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/it-downtime-blog/2008/04/error-messages-you-never-want-1.html

:-)

-- 
I will be brief but not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the
world's shortest speech. He said, "I will be so brief I am already
finished," then he sat down.

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>
http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/it-downtime-blog/2008/04/error-messages-you-never-want-1.html

CodeProject has an interesting error message I stumbled upon a few times:

"Error Page Error. err...

Unfortunately it seems that our error handling page has, ironically, an 
error. It's going to be one of those days."

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Unfortunately, it has become common for programs to give messages such 
as "an unexpected error has occurred. Sorry."

[BTW, WTF is an *expected* error anyway??]

When I was at college, this would _never_ do. Programs are expected to 
"fail gracefully" - and they are expected to provide *meaningful* error 
condition descriptions. Any program that didn't would be harshly 
down-marked. The people at that college may not have known anything 
about Pascal, but they knew about program design! o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote

> Unfortunately, it has become common for programs to give messages such
> as "an unexpected error has occurred. Sorry."
>
> [BTW, WTF is an *expected* error anyway??]

Actually, the above *is* an example of an expected error (the programmer put
that message in, didn't he?). Unexpected errors either go unnoticed or crash
the system.

> When I was at college, this would _never_ do. Programs are expected to
> "fail gracefully" - and they are expected to provide *meaningful* error
> condition descriptions.

Well, real life begins when college ends.

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>> When I was at college, this would _never_ do. Programs are expected to
>> "fail gracefully" - and they are expected to provide *meaningful* error
>> condition descriptions.
> 
> Well, real life begins when college ends.

Not necessarily. I'm still waiting for my "real" life to begin... :-/

BTW, irony: At college, we had a C compiler that used to give us all 
this error message, and to this day nobody knows what that message 
actually means. Including the tutors. Hmm. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> BTW, irony: At college, we had a C compiler that used to give us all 
> this error message, and to this day nobody knows what that message 
> actually means. Including the tutors. Hmm. ;-)

Yay for open source. You could have looked into the compiler code :)

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> [BTW, WTF is an *expected* error anyway??]

  For example incorrect input, network connection problems, hardware
failures (such as inability to read from disc), etc. etc.

  Even seen eg. those 404 messages? That's an expected error which
sometimes happens.

  An unexpected error is something which shouldn't happen but happened
anyways (instead of the program crashing, the unexpected situation was
caught).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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. wrote:
> "Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote

> > Unfortunately, it has become common for programs to give messages such
> > as "an unexpected error has occurred. Sorry."
> >
> > [BTW, WTF is an *expected* error anyway??]

> Actually, the above *is* an example of an expected error (the programmer put
> that message in, didn't he?). Unexpected errors either go unnoticed or crash
> the system.

  Wrong. Unexpected errors are things which should never happen, and if
they do the indicate a bug in the program.
  Typical example:

switch(something)
{
 case A: ...
 case B: ...
 ...

 default:
    error("Unexpected error happened.");
    // This should never happen because all possible cases were dealt above.
    // If we ever get here, it's a clear sign of a bug in the program.
}

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:481a2348@news.povray.org...
> . wrote:
> > "Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote

> > > Unfortunately, it has become common for programs to give messages such
> > > as "an unexpected error has occurred. Sorry."
> > >
> > > [BTW, WTF is an *expected* error anyway??]

> > Actually, the above *is* an example of an expected error (the programmer
put
> > that message in, didn't he?). Unexpected errors either go unnoticed or
crash
> > the system.

>  Wrong. Unexpected errors are things which should never happen, and if
>  they do

Want to rephrase that? <g>

> the indicate a bug in the program.
>   Typical example:
>
> switch(something)
> {
>  case A: ...
>  case B: ...
>  ...
>
>  default:
>     error("Unexpected error happened.");
>     // This should never happen because all possible cases were dealt
above.
>     // If we ever get here, it's a clear sign of a bug in the program.
> }

No, the error is either expected, but programmer shows bad form (ie, the
programmer anticipates "illegal" input but doesn't check it at the procedure
entry, and instead does it inside program logic) or a pointless exercise, as
in:

If ((X=True)=True)=True Then ... //just making sure!...

or

If X=4 Then
   ...
Else if X<>4 Then
  ...
Else
  Exception()..

Sure, QM, if nothing else, tells us that there are no guarantees, but it's
pointless to expect an error where it cannot logically be, or raise
exceptions in places that cannot logically be reached. Conversely, under
abnormal circumstances, all opcodes are suspect.

I agree, however, that "unexpected errors" are bugs.

PS. Yes, I know, some programming languages are perverse enough that the
code above makes sense.

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:481a22ae@news.povray.org...
> Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > [BTW, WTF is an *expected* error anyway??]

>   For example incorrect input, network connection problems, hardware
> failures (such as inability to read from disc), etc. etc.
>
>   Even seen eg. those 404 messages? That's an expected error which
> sometimes happens.

404 is not an error on the part of the server but a perfectly well defined
and normal response. If I ask you for a glass of wine and you tell me
there's no wine, that doesn't indiate an error on your part. An error would
be if you tell me "green" in response to the question "what colour is
wine?". One cannot even say it's an error on part of the client - it depends
on context. If the client is, say, purposefully sending a bunch of random or
semi random requests (maybe DOS attack), then it's not in error when
requesting nonexistant pages. Programmers call responses like 404 errors out
of sloppiness or laziness.

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