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3 Errors and Warnings

Things may go wrong, either during the compilation or the execution of your program. Note that some things that would be compile-time errors in many other languages – such as syntax errors – are in fact run-time errors in INTERCAL.

Errors and warnings appear as an error code starting with ‘ICL’, followed by a three digit number, followed by ‘I’ for an error or ‘W’ for a warning. However, they will be notated here as ‘E000’, etc., to save space and because consistency was never a strong point of INTERCAL. This is followed by a text description of the error, and a hint as to the location of the error. This is not the line on which the error occurred, but rather the line on which the next command to be executed is. To add to the fun, the calculation of the next command to be executed is done at compile-time rather than runtime, so it may be completely wrong due to things like abstention on COME FROMs or computed COME FROMs. The moral of this story is that, if you really want to know where the error is, use a debugger. Note also that if the error happens at compile-time, there is no guarantee that the line number given makes any sense at all. Some errors don’t give next line numbers, mostly those for which it doesn’t make logical sense, such as E633 (see E633). After this is a suggestion to correct (or reconsider) the source code and to resubnit it. (This typo has been carefully preserved for over a decade.)


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