Cannot execute pkunzip - errno 1
Cannot execute pkunzip - errno 5
What, you ask, is error number 1 and 5? Well, I produced errno 1 by hiding
pkunzip so import could not find the program. I produced errno 5 by flooding
ram with resident programs so import could find pkunzip but could not load
it.
So import reports error numbers to your screen, but does not return them
as errorlevels and does not tell you in any documentation, or in the message
itself what the error numbers mean!
The previous is a consistent, yet mysterious (to me) practice of many
many programmers: They include error messages in their code, but
make it almost impossible to figure out what the error messages mean.
The messages themselves are famous as unbreakable codes, and quite often
there is no list of error messages in the documentation. Indeed, the
messages are often embedded in the code in such a way that is hard
to collect them in a list.
Does anyone have insights into the origins of this behaviour?