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

On Feb 10, 2012, at 2:43 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

Yes, I agree. Are you suggesting that there's low-hanging fruit in the form of a more general solution?

John

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4624 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev/archive/attachments/20120210/9d5d431c/attachment-0001.p7s>