[Info-vax] Unexpected error using ZIP for OpenVMS

[Steven Schweda]

> OK, you're using "unexpected" to mean "very unlikely". Fair enough.

   Actually, I was using "unexpected" to describe "something
which a normal person would not reasonably expect", but this
concept seems foreign to some of us.  But, as I said, I've
grown tired of trying to explain this one.

> But when you strand yourself by running out of gas, I don't think
> you're going to say you expected it!

   Wrong again.  I have been in a few situations where I
either did or did not run out of fuel, but I had been
watching the needle on the gauge bounce off the pin near "E"
for a while, so, while I may have been disappointed, I was
hardly surprised when the engine died.  (On one memorable
occasion, at around 02:00, when I was getting pretty
desperate in my search for an open gas station in the wilds
of southern Minnesota, I was greatly relieved to spot an
illuminated Standard station in the distance.  (It was a
while ago.)  As I turned off the street into the station, I
put in the clutch, and the engine died, but I was still
rolling, and able to coast up to the pump.)

> The ordinary user would be puzzled. This would be a puzzling error.

   Perhaps because the error was unexpected.

> When I encounter errors like this, I don't say to myself, "I wasn't
> expecting that." I would instead say, "Why is this happening?"

   Luckily, what you do or don't say to yourself in such a
situation is not particularly relevant here.

> Also a puzzling error. First check the file. If the file is okay,
> check the code.

   An ordinary user might not expect to have to check the
code.

> OK, the muon was an unexpected discovery. (At that time, Nobel
> laureate I. I. Rabi famously quipped, "Who ordered that?") The
> analogous case in programming would be finding that a program could do
> something you weren't expecting it to!

   How about finding that a program was unable to do
something which you had (reasonably) assumed that it could
do?  (To the extent that you had thought about it at all,
that is.)  Like, say, Zip being unable to read a file with
Record format: Stream or Stream_CR?  Some of us might call
that an unexpected error.  As one of us did.  And he was
generally (but, apparently, not universally) well understood.