[skipkey]

The old Clipper 5 compiler had some fun error messages. The two that I remember running into were “Ford Maverick Error”, and my personal favorite, “Carnage! Module name crushed in compilation disaster!”. I ran across both abusing its preprocessor.

[andrewf]

I learned to program on various dBase languages. That Clipper 5 preprocessor was quite the thing! It reminds me of https://research.swtch.com/shmacro but it met a real need, lowering a COBOL-like syntax to a C/Pascal-like one.

(dBase code looks like https://github.com/harbour/core/blob/master/tests/ntx.prg , and https://github.com/harbour/core/blob/master/include/std.ch is an open-source reimplementation of Clipper's preprocessor definitions).

[monitron]

I’m so curious, what could a Ford Maverick error possibly signify?

[skipkey]

I’m honestly not sure. I met a couple of the developers at a convention a few years later, and found out the carnage one was where a stack of tokens from the tokenizer was unexpectedly deleted, but we didn’t talk about the other one. I suspect someone probably owned a Maverick that was buggy tho, or didn’t run.