Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Monday, 30 September 2002

# 6:40 PM

Another John-Wood-ism, from another post in the same thread that invented nasal demons:

...the C compiler itself MUST issue a diagnostic IF this is the first required diagnostic resulting from your program, and then MAY itself cause demons to fly from your nose (which, by the way, could well BE the documented diagnostic message)

concisely and accurately describing the (lack of) specification in the C standard about what constitutes a diagnostic message. I like the mental image of turning over a page in a compiler manual and discovering a sentence like "in the event that the compiler detects a syntactic or semantic error, you will be notified by means of a demon flying out of your nose."