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Refining the Delta Debugging of Type Errors

Sharrad, Joanna, Chitil, Olaf (2022) Refining the Delta Debugging of Type Errors. In: 33rd Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages (IFL '21). IFL '21: Proceedings of the 33rd Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages. . ACM, New York, NY, USA E-ISBN 978-1-4503-8644-9. (doi:10.1145/3544885.3544888) (KAR id:96134)

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.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Proceeding)
DOI/Identification number: 10.1145/3544885.3544888
Uncontrolled keywords: type error, error diagnosis, black box, delta debugging
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics (inc Computing science) > QA 76 Software, computer programming, > QA76.76 Computer software
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Olaf Chitil
Date Deposited: 08 Aug 2022 12:57 UTC
Last Modified: 20 Jun 2023 11:25 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/96134 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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