Towards a taxonomy of novices' misconceptions of the Prolog interpreter

Fung, Pat; Brayshaw, Mike; Boulay, Benedict du; Elsom-Cook, Mark

doi:10.1007/bf00116443

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…Fortunately a great deal of work has been carried out on the kinds of misunderstandings novices tend to have of the Prolog execution model (Fung et al, 1990). The protocols will give an insight into how the subject interprets the SV and execution of the program.…”

Section: Misunderstandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Using a fine-grained comparative evaluation technique to understand and design software visualization tools

Mulholland

1997

Papers Presented at the Seventh Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers - ESP '97

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Software Visualization can be defined as the use of graphical and textual formalisms to describe the execution of computer programs. A large amount of Software Visualization technology has been developed to support computer science education, using a range of interface techniques. Far less effort has been devoted to evaluating the technology. As a result, it is unclear how effective Software Visualization tools are, either for students or professional programmers. Even more worrying, it is doubtful whether lessons are being learnt in successive designs of Software Visualization tools, or whether the application of new technologies (e.g. 3D animation and the intemet) has become the primary goal, rather than the true goal of making computer programs easier to understand. To counter this problem the study reported here used protocol analysis to develop a fine-grained account of user behaviour, identifying (i) information access from the display, (ii) the use of comprehension strategies, and (iii) misunderstandings of the visualization and execution. The results were able to motivate future deigns which in turn could be compared and improved. The approach is compared to other evaluation techniques which aim to inform design. Finally, the generalizability of the approach is considered. INTRODUCTIONThis paper presents a framework for the principled evaluation and design of Software Visualization (SV) technology. SV is the process of using techniques such as typography, graphic design, animation and cinematography to provide representations of a program and its execution. Though a great deal of research effort is being devoted to SV development, SVs are still not widely used in practice, either by professional programmers or within computer programming education. Price, Small and Baecker (1993) argue an important reason why the technology has not been readily taken up is because its benefits have not been clearly demonstrated. Allied to this, is the uncertainty as to whether SV technology is improving, by learning lessons from earlier systems and using these lessons to motivate designs of the future. The SV field is certainly progressing technologically, though whether it is progressing from a cognitive or educational perspective is unclear.There have been a few empirical evaluations of SV technology. These have generally been coarsegrained, measuring how quickly or successfully certain tasks can be carried out with various SVs. These studies can provide estimates as to which SV "is best" for certain tasks or users but tell us little about "why". This paper reports on the development and application of a new methodology.The methodology uses protocol analysis (Ericsson and Simon, 1984) to gain cognitive evidence as to how SVs are used and understood. Previous research in the psychology of programming can be used to determine the types of cognitive evidence we can expect to identify within the protocols of subjects using a SV. SVs are intended to support the programmer in the tasks of program comprehension and de...

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Section: Misunderstandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prolog was therefore chosen as the language. A great deal of research has considered how it is used (Taylor, 1988) and the conceptual difficulties students have encountered (Fung, Brayshaw, du Boulay and Elsom-Cook, 1990). Also, a number of SVs have been developed for the Prolog language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using a fine-grained comparative evaluation technique to understand and design software visualization tools

Mulholland

1997

Papers Presented at the Seventh Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers - ESP '97

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“…The unification and backtracking behaviours of the interpreter are cases in point. They are certainly a source of errors for the novice (Taylor, 1987;Fung et al, 1987). Likewise experts can make errors using-themrequiringadebugger-tobe-sensitivrtosuch-behaviourFor-novices-alsothe lack of syntactic cues as compared to other languages may cause additional problems specific to Prolog (Gilmore, in press).…”

Section: Automatic Debuggingand Intelligent Tutoring Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An overview of Prolog debugging tools

et al. 1991

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“…Some other interesting work on edit distance introduces swapping of characters as additional edit operation besides replace, add, and delete [ 111. This idea could be integrated into our fuzzy unification definition, and would make sense as [4] points out that this is a common mistake in logic programming. Besides our purely syntactical string comparisons, it may be desirable to consider semantical similarity.…”

Section: Comparison and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Our work is closely related to Arcelli, Formato, Gerla [3], who develop an abstract framework for fuzzy unification and resolution. There are important differences: First, [3] does not allow unification of predicates of different arity, which is however a problem often occurring in Prolog programming [4]. Second, [3] is not an extension of classical unification, which is important for compatibility reasons.…”

Section: Comparison and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 98%

FURY: fuzzy unification and resolution based on edit distance

Gilbert

Schroeder

Proceedings IEEE International Symposium on Bio-Informatics and Biomedical Engineering

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We present a theoretically founded framework for fuzzy unification and resolution based on edit distance over trees. Our fianiewor-k extends classical unification and resolution conservatively We prove important properties of the framework and develop the FURY system, which implements the fiamework eficiently using dynamic programming. We evaluate the ,framework and system or1 a large problem in the bioinformatics domain, that of detecting typographical errors in an enzyme name database.

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Towards a taxonomy of novices' misconceptions of the Prolog interpreter

Cited by 10 publications

References 13 publications

Using a fine-grained comparative evaluation technique to understand and design software visualization tools

Using a fine-grained comparative evaluation technique to understand and design software visualization tools

An overview of Prolog debugging tools

FURY: fuzzy unification and resolution based on edit distance

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