[racket-dev] very unhelpful beginner language error message, possible fix proposed

From: Matthias Felleisen (matthias at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 10 17:52:26 EST 2012


Yes, and it was submitted in some form as a bug before. Why don't you modify teach.rkt and see whether you like the result better. Then submit. 




On Feb 10, 2012, at 5:43 PM, Danny Yoo wrote:

>> 
>> "Ho Ho!" thought I. "Beginner Student Racket will give a much better error message." Actually, though, the error message was much worse: it highlighted the id "list-sum-odd" in what should have been the 'else' case, and wrote:
>> 
>> "list-sum-odd: expected a function call, but there is no open parenthesis before this function"
>> 
>> ... which is really terrible, because there *IS* a parenthesis right before the function name.
> 
> 
> This is a variation of one of the cases described in Guillaume's paper
> on error messages.  Figure 4 of
> http://gmarceau.qc.ca/papers/Marceau-2010-Measuring-Effectiveness.pdf
> _________________________
>  Racket Developers list:
>  http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev



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