{"id":39278,"date":"2023-05-04T15:45:56","date_gmt":"2023-05-04T19:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=39278"},"modified":"2026-01-07T15:11:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T20:11:33","slug":"compiler-humor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/04\/compiler-humor\/","title":{"rendered":"Compiler Humor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cs.cmu.edu\/~jasonh\/personal\/humor\/compile.html\">Tony Cunningham<\/a> (via <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=35192307\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.cs.cmu.edu\/~jasonh\/personal\/humor\/compile.html\"><p>These are some of the error messages produced by Apple&rsquo;s MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.)<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler&rdquo;<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>&ldquo;type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don&rsquo;t care, I&rsquo;m just trying to annoy you)&rdquo;<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>&ldquo;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&rsquo;t wide enough to read this whole error message&rdquo;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/techhub.social\/@provuejim\/110194678713231266\">Jim Rea<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/techhub.social\/@provuejim\/110194678713231266\"><p>This parody of Jefferson Airplane&rsquo;s classic song &ldquo;White Rabbit&rdquo; is about programming psychedelia&mdash;undefined behavior in C. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One flag makes it faster<br \/>\nand one flag makes it small<br \/>\nand the deprecated -Wchkp<br \/>\ndoesn&rsquo;t do anything at all. [&#8230;]<\/p><\/blockquote><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/19\/c-undefined-behavior-in-sqlite\/\">C Undefined Behavior in SQLite<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/13\/undefined-behavior-in-c\/\">Undefined Behavior in C<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/20\/mpws-about-box\/\">MPW&rsquo;s About Box<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/13\/finding-undefined-behavior-bugs-by-finding-dead-code\/\">Finding Undefined Behavior Bugs by Finding Dead Code<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/30\/detecting-overflows-undefined-behaviour-and-other-nasties\/\">Detecting Overflows, Undefined Behaviour and Other Nasties<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/14\/craziest-compiler-output-due-to-undefined-behavior\/\">Craziest Compiler Output Due to Undefined Behavior<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p id=\"compiler-humor-update-2023-09-04\">Update (2023-09-04): <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11608\">Jon Snader<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11608\">\n<p>There&rsquo;s a long tradition of this sort humor, especially in the Unix world. There&rsquo;s the famous &ldquo;bug&rdquo; listed at the end of the <code>tunefs<\/code> man page: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/jargon\/html\/T\/tunafish.html\">You can tune a file system, but you can&rsquo;t tunafish<\/a>. That joke was in the BSD Unix distribution until the suits discovered it and had it removed. Then there was the in-joke <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bell-labs.com\/usr\/dmr\/www\/odd.html\">values of &#x3B2; will give rise to dom!<\/a> error diagnostic from the Version 6 <code>mv<\/code> utility. Dennis Ritchie explains the joke at the link.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tony Cunningham (via Hacker News): These are some of the error messages produced by Apple&rsquo;s MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.)[&#8230;]&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler&rdquo;[&#8230;]&ldquo;type [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2023-05-04T19:45:59Z","apple_news_api_id":"42445b3c-c176-4bff-9be9-6ccee0409ebf","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2026-01-07T20:11:36Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AQkRbPMF2S_-b6WzO4ECevw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[45,255,295,2457,30,1059,71],"class_list":["post-39278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming-category","tag-c","tag-compiler","tag-history","tag-humor","tag-mac","tag-macintosh-programmers-workshop-mpw","tag-programming"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39278"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50644,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39278\/revisions\/50644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}