Crowd-sourcing the meaning of compiler error messages

An interesting project named Pycee, from The University of Adelaide, has investigated the improvement and clarification of compiler error messages by first capturing a compiler's original error messages, and then automating a search of the website StackOverflow for crowd-sourced explanations of the messages.

Pycee was initially written to support programming in Python and the work was published in a paper entitled "Enhancing Python Compiler Error Messages via Stack Overflow" [1]. The source code for Pycee is freely available via GitHub as a Python module for a popular IDE [2].

This project will attempt to similarly augment compiler and interpreter error messages for different languages, such as C or Java, in the hope that crowd-sourced answers to posted questions may be easier for novice programmers to understand. The project must involve an evaluation component, where current CSSE students are invited to comment of the effectiveness of the augmented error messages.

[1]
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.11456
[2]
https://pypi.org/project/pycee2/

Client


Contact: Chris McDonald
Phone: 6488 2533
Email: [email protected]
Preferred contact: Email
Location: CSSE Rm 2.20

IP Exploitation Model


The IP exploitation model requested by the Client is: Creative Commons (open source) http://creativecommons.org.au/


Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
The University of Western Australia
Last modified: 22 July 2021
Modified By: Michael Wise 		UWA