Worst Exception!!

[Jorgen Andersson]

In my circles BYOB would definitely be an exception. Except as a present.

Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES! Abraham Lincoln

[Breamore Boy]

Error number 5692305182344859072314609

[aayawa]

Apple used to give ones like An error of type 10 occurred because an error of type 10 occurred.

[Tomz_KV]

Jacquers wrote:

object reference not set to an instance of an object

This exception message is not useful at all. It would be nice if it gives the object name.

TOMZ_KV

[gjpt]

Keyboard error Press F1

[Lost User]

I guess the worst exception I have seen is the "uncaught exception"... That one who calls std::terminate() and then calls abort() :P Saludos!! ____ichr@mm :wq

[KLSmith]

Seems to me that worst is being interpreted as either: nonsensical, useless (programmer too lazy to write a meaningful message), or a dreaded message, where something bad really did happen. Here is a nonsensical one: One recent message in my Windows-7 system event log was The service failed to start. Reason: The service finished successfully.

[scosta_FST]

"Catastrophic error" is a real message I've seen years ago, from Windows XP.

[BrainiacV]

Hahahaha...Reminds me of a COBOL program I wrote in high school. I tried to write a COBOL without the temporary storage. I tried to go from the input field directly to the output field. My one (or two) page program generated 200 pages of error messages.

Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.

[BrainiacV]

I always hated working in Oracle's PL/SQL. I'd get "BAD END STATEMENT", which I finally tracked down to mean "LABEL NOT FOUND". I guess it found the end of the program before it found the label it was looking for and decided it was the end statement's fault. I'm sorry, I wrote a better interpreter in high school when I made a program that would read symbolic labeled BASIC programs and generate the version with line numbers (that was required at that time). I was slowly wallpapering my cubicle with Oracle error messages and their real meaning. The Oracle database engine may have been programmed by the A-Team, but I always thought the programming interface was written by the F Troop. To this day, I refuse to do Oracle database programming.

Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.

[StatementTerminator]

The offending value would be kinda nice to know as well! I once had to deal with this in a daily import file that we were processing from another company. The file had tens of thousands of records, and I wrote the code to import the data into our system. Someone at the company who gave us the import file liked to go in and make manual edits once in a while...yeah. The specs were not meant as suggestions. So I had one bad value in one field of one record in a large import file, causing the whole import to bomb, and no clue other than a guess at which columns were suspect. Thanks MS SQL. I had to implement a binary search to cast values in the file until I found the bad one. Good times.

[Harley L Pebley]

The one that should be raised but isn't, or caught and simply ignored, causing the application to not work correctly with no indication as to why.

[Peter Webb]

Up until yesterday "Out of Memory" was my worst exception. By coincidence, today I found out was not actually an exception, but an error condition in Java, which explains why I wasn't catching it. So now its been promoted to worst throwable. And I hate pretty much everything you can throw.

[StatementTerminator]

LOL, this kind of lazy exception "handling" is worse than none at all :) But why should a consultant care, they don't have to actually maintain the code.

[Dark Pallys]

"Catastrophic Failure", no more, no less. No error code, no reference to where the error came from or how it got there..... SIGH! There's nothing worse than getting an error like that after a 12 hour coding session...

[StatementTerminator]

PC LOAD LETTER This is what happens when full-blown engineers who write a little code try their hand at exception handling. Everyone knows that PC means paper cassette (what else could it possibly mean?), and that LETTER means the letter-size paper tray, right? Surely that's more informative than "ADD PAPER," I mean it tells you exactly what kind of paper to use and where to put it. My favorite, though, is the GPF error message from Windows 95/NT: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Back in the NT/95 days I worked as the IT guy for a public library. People would get that message on the public terminals and freak out, expecting the police to show up. I thought about hacking the Windows API to add sirens and flashing lights to the dialog, but figured it might not look good on my next review. The conversations I had with patrons trying to explain the error were pretty funny though. Even funnier were the patrons who just got up and made a bee-line for the door, wonder what they were surfing?

[Patrick Fox]

That was my choice too, Out of Memory. GDI throws this a lot and it's misleading. People with 8 gigs of ram scratch their heads wondering where it went wrong. GDI uses limited pools of memory for its stuff, and when it runs out it doesn't tell you which of these pools was exhausted. Even worse it usually lacks GDI resources to throw up a message box telling you it ran into a problem. I've dealt with this a lot in the past week.

[patbob]

C#'s missing DLL exception is my absolute favorite worst. Not the exception itself, but because Microsoft put all these convenient fields in for identifying which DLL was missing, and then didn't bother to actually fill any of them in. [edit] Not worst, but rather my all time favorite, was the insufficient memory error message from the IBM (3090?) we had at school. It included the 800 phone number of the sales team so you could contact them to buy more memory. Of course, configuring the VM to have more RAM was the cheap answer :)

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

[waarnink]

Who is General Failure? And why is he reading drive A?

[patbob]

YvesDaoust wrote:

This one gives me nightmares because so far I have been unable to troubleshoot it. The application refuses to start, that's it. No clue on what DLL was missing/of invalid type or whatsoever

Check into sxstrace. It generates a log of all side-by-side library loads, reporting what library versions were checked and which were loaded (or not found). Totally useless for C# though, but useful for native code.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.