{"title":"Refining the Delta Debugging of Type Errors","authors":"Joanna Sharrad, O. Chitil","doi":"10.1145/3544885.3544888","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Understanding the cause of a type error can be challenging; for over 30 years, researchers have proposed many sophisticated solutions that hardly made it into practice. Previously we presented a simple method for locating the cause of a type error in a functional program. Our method applies Zeller’s isolating delta debugging algorithm, using the compiler as a black box: Simple line-based program slicing searches for a type error location. To improve speed, we incorporated a pre-processing stage for handling parse errors. In this paper, we note that the method needs refining. We introduce a new algorithm that replaces the previous pre-processing of parse errors with on-request handling. We implemented the algorithm and evaluated it for Haskell and OCaml programs to demonstrate that it is language agnostic.","PeriodicalId":176585,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 33rd Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 33rd Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3544885.3544888","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Understanding the cause of a type error can be challenging; for over 30 years, researchers have proposed many sophisticated solutions that hardly made it into practice. Previously we presented a simple method for locating the cause of a type error in a functional program. Our method applies Zeller’s isolating delta debugging algorithm, using the compiler as a black box: Simple line-based program slicing searches for a type error location. To improve speed, we incorporated a pre-processing stage for handling parse errors. In this paper, we note that the method needs refining. We introduce a new algorithm that replaces the previous pre-processing of parse errors with on-request handling. We implemented the algorithm and evaluated it for Haskell and OCaml programs to demonstrate that it is language agnostic.