Computer Recreations
Creative Computing, Sept-Oct. 1977
D. Van Tassel<p>Syntax Messages<p>In the March-April 1977 issue I suggested you write a program to generate as many different syntax-error messages as possible with as few statements in the program as possible.<p>I received a few responses but first prize must go to Wayne M. Compton of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He sent me a COBOL program with just one statement which generated 570 error messages. The statement was just the program name paragraph:<p>PROGRAM-ID. ERRMSG.<p>The compiler then went wild and generated 570 error messages. He ran this program on a IBM 370 OS/VS system. If you have access to such a system you might try it.
ERRMSG yields a list of all error messages, so the compiler wasn't "going wild", but behaving according to spec. A modern COBOL should beat that handily; no doubt they've added at least one or two new errors between 1977 and now.<p>source: <a href="https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/cobol-error-messages-are-not-documented" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/cobol-error-messages-are-n...</a>
C++ is hard to beat: <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/tgceec/74534916370/results-of-the-grand-c-error-explosion" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.tumblr.com/tgceec/74534916370/results-of-the-gra...</a>
Have seen C++ go berserk and throw miles of errors when template implementation gets fumbled. Have also seen Java go stark raving mad over relatively minor infractions. Wish I had some examples handy.