PDP-11 COBOL: In those days, Column 1 in your program was reserved for forms control. This was a vestige of punched cards and drum printers.

Something like "DATA-DIVISION" was supposed to be entered " DATA-DIVISION".

With column 1 eaten up for forms control, this was interpreted as "ATA-DIVISION" (at least there was no such line in COBOL as "MASS-STORAGE"! :o )

Miss that and you get endless messages: "Fatal error, abandoning compilation"

One error for EACH line of code.

We were banging on Ctrl-C endlessly until the damned thing stopped printing.