A concept of user agent for user interface of C compiler

Abstract

Programming is one of the most important factors in the education of computer literacy. However, in the initial learning of programming, many students often have faced a simple problem, like syntax-errors by carelessness or mis-typing. Therefore, they feel that programming is too hard. The most important problem is the student can't take advantage of the error messages displayed by the computer. These messages are difficult to understand for beginners because the message only indicates a syntactic error and where it occurred. The authors propose a support system for C language programming on UNIX by using agent technology. This system monitors the error messages from the compiler. It analyzes, rewrites the acquired message, and reports to the student and the teacher on the network. The teacher can improve the teaching method by finding the category of error. The student customizes these messages, and they can use the suitable one at each level. Moreover, these messages are sent to other students by the communication line of each agent. Consequently, many students are able to use these useful messages; they can select the most preferable message from the collection of the agent. The authors executed a preliminary experiment and the improvement of efficiency to the complication work was confirmed.