Why is the software world full of status codes?

Posted by David V McKay on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by David V McKay
Published on 2010-03-14T22:05:10Z Indexed on 2010/03/14 22:15 UTC
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programming-history

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programming-practices

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legacy

Why did programmers ever start using status codes? I mean, I guess I could imagine this might be useful back in the days when a text string was an expensive resource. WAYYY back then. But even after we had megabytes of memory to work with, we continued to use them. What possible advantage could there be for obfuscating the meaning of an error message or status message behind a status code?

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