Improving Error Messages in Type System

Kustanto, Cynthia; Kameyama, Yutaka

doi:10.2197/ipsjtrans.3.125

Cited by 1 publication

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References 9 publications

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“…Becker [2] adapts Haack and Wells's al-gorithm to OCaml, also with a few OCaml-specific extensions. Kustanto and Kameyama [13] propose algorithmic improvements to Haack and Wells's algorithm. Zhang and Myers [22] analyse the error slices produced using Bayesian principles in order to identify the explanations most likely to be correct, and thereby report a single location to the user.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Type Error Messages in OCaml

Charguéraud¹

2015

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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Cryptic type error messages are a major obstacle to learning OCaml or other ML-based languages. In many cases, error messages cannot be interpreted without a sufficiently-precise model of the type inference algorithm. The problem of improving type error messages in ML has received quite a bit of attention over the past two decades, and many different strategies have been considered. The challenge is not only to produce error messages that are both sufficiently concise and systematically useful to the programmer, but also to handle a full-blown programming language and to cope with large-sized programs efficiently.In this work, we present a modification to the traditional ML type inference algorithm implemented in OCaml that, by significantly reducing the left-to-right bias, allows us to report error messages that are more helpful to the programmer. Our algorithm remains fully predictable and continues to produce fairly concise error messages that always help making some progress towards fixing the code. We implemented our approach as a patch to the OCaml compiler in just a few hundred lines of code. We believe that this patch should benefit not just to beginners, but also to experienced programs developing large-scale OCaml programs.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Type Error Messages in OCaml

Charguéraud¹

2015

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Improving Error Messages in Type System

Cited by 1 publication

References 9 publications

Improving Type Error Messages in OCaml

Improving Type Error Messages in OCaml

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