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

+1

Robby

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
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> 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
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>>  http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
>
>
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