research-article

Corrective hints for type incorrect generic Java programs

Authors:

Nabil El Boustani,

Jurriaan HageAuthors Info & Claims

PEPM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation

Pages 5 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/1706356.1706360

Published: 18 January 2010 Publication History

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Abstract

Since version 1.5, generics (parametric polymorphism) are part of the Java language. Experience with implementations of the Java Language Specification such as EJC and JAVAC has shown that the type error messages provided by these tools leave more than a little to be desired. Type error messages are often uninformative and sometimes show artifacts of the type checking process in the messages. Apparently, providing good type error messages for a language as large and complex as Java currently is, is not easy.

To alleviate the problem, we describe a number of heuristics that suggest fixes for generic method invocations in Generic Java, and illustrate their effect by means of examples. The heuristics are part of an extension to the original type checking process that has been implemented into the JastAdd Extensible Java Compiler.

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Cited By

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Bettini L(2019)Type errors for the IDE with Xtext and XsemanticsOpen Computer Science10.1515/comp-2019-00039:1(52-79)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.1515/comp-2019-0003
Becker BDenny PPettit RBouchard DBouvier DHarrington BKamil AKarkare AMcDonald COsera PPearce JPrather JRößling GGiannakos MScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)Compiler Error Messages Considered UnhelpfulProceedings of the Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3344429.3372508(177-210)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3344429.3372508
Rahli VWells JPirie JKamareddine F(2017)SkalpelJournal of Symbolic Computation10.1016/j.jsc.2016.07.01380:P1(164-208)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jsc.2016.07.013
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Index Terms

Corrective hints for type incorrect generic Java programs
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers

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PEPM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation

January 2010

168 pages

ISBN:9781605587271

DOI:10.1145/1706356

Program Chairs:
John Gallagher
Roskilde University, Denmark, and IMDEA Software, Spain
,
Janis Voigtländer
University of Bonn, Germany

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 18 January 2010

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PEPM '10: Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation

January 18 - 19, 2010

Madrid, Spain

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Overall Acceptance Rate 66 of 120 submissions, 55%

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Bettini L(2019)Type errors for the IDE with Xtext and XsemanticsOpen Computer Science10.1515/comp-2019-00039:1(52-79)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.1515/comp-2019-0003
Becker BDenny PPettit RBouchard DBouvier DHarrington BKamil AKarkare AMcDonald COsera PPearce JPrather JRößling GGiannakos MScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)Compiler Error Messages Considered UnhelpfulProceedings of the Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3344429.3372508(177-210)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3344429.3372508
Rahli VWells JPirie JKamareddine F(2017)SkalpelJournal of Symbolic Computation10.1016/j.jsc.2016.07.01380:P1(164-208)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jsc.2016.07.013
Weijers JHage JHoldermans S(2014)Security type error diagnosis for higher-order, polymorphic languagesScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2014.03.01195:P2(200-218)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2014.03.011
Weijers JHage JHoldermans SAlbert EMu S(2013)Security type error diagnosis for higher-order, polymorphic languagesProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2013 workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation10.1145/2426890.2426894(3-12)Online publication date: 21-Jan-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2426890.2426894
Boustani NHage J(2011)Improving type error messages for generic JavaHigher-Order and Symbolic Computation10.1007/s10990-011-9070-324:1-2(3-39)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10990-011-9070-3

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Improving type error messages for generic java

Improving type error messages for generic Java

A type system for object initialization in the Java bytecode language

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