[racket] Global Racket Error Recorder

On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 11:16:47AM -0700, John Clements wrote:
> For now, this goes in the FYI category: I have a student that's implemented a simple error-recording database. We've now installed it on our lab machines, and you can see some early results here:
> 
> http://li21-127.members.linode.com:8020/errrecorder
> 
> The goal of the project is to allow students & others to provide helpful hints that will guide people toward solutions to their problems.  As you can see, this early version has way-too-coarse categories: we're looking into using measures of string similarity to group similar-looking error messages.
> 
> John
> 
Also FYI:  The writers of the CDC Algol 68 compiler used an LR parser.  
When the time came to do parsing error recovery, they initially used 
some heuristics.  However, every time a user complained about a bad 
error recovery, they figured out what error recovery he wanted, found 
the spot in the FSM where it had been done badly, and inserted an 
hand-picked error recovery.

It ended up with very good error recovery.

-- hendrik