[Info-vax] Unexpected error using ZIP for OpenVMS

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article
<efeb9dfc-8c48-44cc-b2e8-81bf890415df at j10g2000vbe.googlegroups.com>, AEF
<spamsink2001 at yahoo.com> writes: 

>   Facility:     RUNOFF, DIGITAL Standard Runoff (DSR)
> 
>   Explanation:  This message should never be displayed.
> 
>   User Action:  Contact a Digital support representative.

At least it says "support representative".  I once so an error from an
IBM compiler which said to contact the IBM SALES [my emphasis] 
representative.

As Richard Maine (someone whose posts in I can recognize as being from
him after reading only half a sentence, without looking at any headers)
in comp.lang.fortran once said, the message "internal compiler error" is
ALWAYS correct: if it's correct, it's correct; if it's not correct, then
this incorrectness is itself an error, so again it's correct. 

I like to have things like

   IF
     blabla
   ELSE IF
     blabla
   ELSE IF
     blabla
   ELSE
     STOP "Can't get here."
   ENDIF

Essentially all agree what success, informational and warning messages 
should be.  What about error or fatal error?  In my own code, I like to 
use error for stuff like bad input data etc which is a user error and 
fatal error for stuff like an internal error (say, some numerical 
routine which failed to converge); the latter would be an "unexpected 
error".  What about stuff like disk full?  VMS tends to treat this as a 
fatal error, perhaps because it isn't directly related to the program 
throwing the error.  I tend to think this is something the user can do 
something about.  :-|

Pet peeve: MOUNT/SHADOW/CONFIRM gives -F- in the perfectly normal case 
that a full shadow copy is required.  Typing "Y" lets the operation 
continue.  Continue from a fatal error with one keystroke?  I would 
classify this as at worst a warning.