Anyway, the biggest problem the students seem to have when programming on their own, is to find their programming errors (bugs).
Simply rewriting the error messages would be an incomplete solution. The programming environment should really help the programmer pinpoint the error's location and its context. In other words, I think a a good GUI debugger would be useful. --Jeff
Simply rewriting the error messages would be an incomplete solution. The programming environment should really help the programmer pinpoint the error's location and its context. In other words, I think a a good GUI debugger would be useful.
Agreed. For example, the latest version of IDLE (to be announced) reports syntax errors by highlighting the offending token in the source code. Of course, we could go further, e.g. by doing the same for runtime errors. It also has a GUI debugger (which needs to be greatly improved before it can be called "good" :-). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
Hello all! On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:
Simply rewriting the error messages would be an incomplete solution. The programming environment should really help the programmer pinpoint the error's location and its context. In other words, I think a a good GUI debugger would be useful.
Agreed. For example, the latest version of IDLE (to be announced) reports syntax errors by highlighting the offending token in the source code. Of course, we could go further, e.g. by doing the same for runtime errors. It also has a GUI debugger (which needs to be greatly improved before it can be called "good" :-).
Very good points came up, and also some good=bad error messages that I failed to come up with yesterday. Error highlighting is very useful. I'm also glad to see that IDLE under windows now can emulate stdin, so that raw_input():s can be used directly from within IDLE so the students don't have to open a DOS-box and try to navigate in it to find their .py:s. But to stick to the "error messages" topic, is there anywhere any nice compilation of python error messages with a bit longer description of the error and possible causes? I think it would ease the decryption of the error messages. Have a nice day, Mikael J.
participants (3)
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Guido van Rossum -
Jeffrey Kunce -
Mikael Johansson