I’ve never been more than an occasional user of Apple’s MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop). I thought it was defunct but apparently Apple’s still supporting it for development on older Classic systems.

Anyway, one thing I recall is that the MPW C compiler had some funny error messages, and this post on Ztuff reminded me of that today. Some nice ones:

“…And the lord said, `lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'”

“a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program”

“This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn’t wide enough to read this whole error message”

“Too many errors on one line (make fewer)”

I promptly looked up the latest official version of MPW on my Apple Developer CDs (August 2001, if you’re interested) and the latest compilers, unfortunately, seem to have been expurged – there are only the usual dry “illegal whatnot found” messages. I’ll have to see if I can find an older edition.

Unfortunately this sort of humor seems to be increasingly rare. The closest thing I could think of in currently shipping software are the ICQ client connection messages:

First we’ll need an ICQ server…

I’m sure I saw a server somewhere…

Attempting to make sure you are who you say you are…

Now, let’s sort out this little issue called ‘logon credentials’…

Doing something complicated…

Waiting in line with millions of other users…

So much data, so little time…

Fulfilling the server’s endless requests…

Initializing all kinds of protocols…

How fussy can you be about one insignificant connection?

Now comes the tricky part…

Seems like the server is a little picky today…

We’re in. Have fun.