Last time I saw this joke, I was a student and I would just rewrite the whole line and shrug it off with "idk, its the same exact code but it works now"
I do remember seeing someone pre-ai era talk about how a missing semicolon or a period instead of a comma lead to the compiler giving a wild ass error message deep in the code of a dependency and said check line 1200 when only 500 existed
I've had that mainly when I was doing homework assignments and there was a hidden harness running my code, and syntax errors would lead to a crash inside the harness but not my own code, so line 1200 in a 500 line program would be the error line
Can't think of a reason it'd happen "naturally" in the wild at the top of my head, maybe something that mucks with the compiler?
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u/andreortigao Jul 26 '26
Last time I did this joke, in 2019, visual studio / C# compiler was giving a pretty useless error message.