Download or read book Intention-based Diagnosis of Novice Programming Errors written by W. Lewis Johnson and published by Morgan Kaufmann. This book was released on 1986 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accurate identification and explication of program bugs requires an understanding of the programmer's intentions. Otherwise it is not possible to determine exactly what part of the program is erroneous, and how best to correct it. Understanding the programmer's intentions is doubly necessary if the programmer is a novice, and the diagnostician is a teacher who is trying to find out why the student is having difficulties. Intention-based error diagnosis has been implemented in a program called PROUST, which identifies non-syntactic bugs in programs written by novice Pascal programmers. Empirical studies of PROUST's performance show that it achieves high performance in finding bugs in non-trivial student programs. This book is intended for people interested in the application of artificial-intelligence techniques to computer-aided instruction, and to automatic program analysis, debugging, and synthesis.