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Comment by wisebit | Hacker News Reader

I've always found it fascinating that Windows/Microsoft error messages seem to have some kind of UUID (Error #c101a053 is one I found on my search history from 5 years ago), but you _can't look them up by UUID_ on the MS help pages or even online (and sometimes they don't seem to even be unique). I've always wanted to know what they do with these numbers.

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That looks like a NTSTATUS value. You often see also HRESULT values. They are structured values, some of the bits tell you which subsystem generated the error, other bits tell you the error number within that subsystem.

Right. My gripe with it is that you tend to see them thrown into error messages without the corresponding string representation, thus forcing the user to do the lookup by hand.

Seriously, it can't be that hard to call the NT equivalent of strerror(3) when formatting these messages.

I've used that technique in products I built. Not speaking for MS but in my case the UUID was either written into some server log (to hopefully be used to diagnose the problem if reported), or matched diagnostic statements in our source code (so the problem could be diagnosed in conjunction with the code). Using a unique identifier helps prevent the kind of confusion caused when 3 different developers all decide that "this can't happen" is a good diagnostic message to display to the user.

Fwiw the identifier you posted isn't a UUID but the same justification applies.

Right, I expressed myself poorly. Maybe I meant just an ID? My gripe was just that I expected that to index a knowledgebase of error messages, but the one I mentioned, for instance, isn't even documented.

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