Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)

I miss this kind of playfulness in computing. When I was at Amazon my manager told me that several years earlier he was responsible for updating the 404 page so he scanned a picture of a cat his daughter drew and made that the body of the page. In 2009 when I started, that was still the image, but at some point someone must have noticed and replaced it with a stock photo of a dog. The asset was still…

Just for some context, the MPW C compiler that produced those messages was actually not developed internally at Apple, but was rather done by Green Hills Software [1] under contract as mentioned on the wikipedia page [2] and its source [3] which is funnily enough about this exact same topic. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Hills_Software [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Wor... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20140528005901/http://lists.appl...

I never had to use the compiler back in my early Mac programming days, as I got into Mac programming starting with Lightspeed C (later THINK C). Some of my friends used MPW, though. MPW was much more expensive. I do remember having to use it years later when I was trying to compile an C library for use on the Newton. I discovered that it was pretty far from an ANSI/ISO compliant C - for example, it didn't accept…