Student programmers have difficulty finding and fixing syntax, logic and style errors in their programs. The Code Analyzer for Pascal (CAP) analyzes programs that use a subset of the Pascal language and provides user-friendly feedback on the errors that it finds. This paper describes CAP and reports its use in teaching introductory programming at the United States Air Force Academy.

Syntactically correct code does not fall from the sky; the process that leads to a student’s first executable program is not well understood. At the University of Kent we have begun to explore the compilation behaviours of novice programmers, or the behaviours that students exhibit while authoring code; in our initial study, we have focused on when and what they choose to compile. By examining these behaviours, we have determined the most common errors encountered by students using BlueJ in our introductory course on object-oriented programming, how those students tend to program when in supervised laboratory sessions, and we have identified future directions of study driven by our initial observations. Our goal is to apply this research to the future development of BlueJ and instructional methodologies involving its use in the classroom. 1.

There is currently considerable interest in the computing community in the evaluation of computer programming. However, in order to objectively evaluate such concepts, it is necessary to undertake a thorough evaluation of the programming process itself. Most previous studies of this type have analyzed, by hand usually, a few instances of programs. This has led to some general conjectures; however, the amount of information that must be processed precludes any large scale analysis. In order to avoid this problem, an automatic data collection facility has been implemented as part of ~a PL/I compiler at the University of Maryland. This system automatically collects information on each program that has been compiled- at almost no additional cost to the user of the compiler~ This paper will describe the system and will evaluate some of the characteristics of some of the 25,000 programs that have been run since July, 1975.

: This paper describes an in-depth analysis of the errors made by novice programmers learning to write programs in a language called SOLO. Although the language is embedded in a helpful environment intended to minimize the difficulties often encountered by novice computer users, a variety of problems still arise. These problems are described in detail, with the aim of analysing their true causes. Recommendations for improving novices' computing environments are made, based upon the principle of `pre-emptive design'. This principle argues that users can profit from an environment in which it is not possible to make syntax errors, and moreover that such an environment need neither be unduly restrictive nor overly demanding of computational resources. INTRODUCTION The study of errors in computer programming has, in the last decade, shifted from an emphasis on syntactic errors (e.g. Boies and Gould, 1974) to an emphasis on semantic and conceptual errors, particularly for novice programmer...

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programming through log analysis

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This paper summarizes one aspect of an ongoing project at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. The project has as its goal a basic understanding of the behavioral factors that limit and determine human performance in interactive computer systems. Reported here is an observational analysis of user interaction with a complex interactive system, the IBM System/360 Time Sharing System (TSS/360). The paper is divided into two sec- tions. The first provides a brief description of TSS/360 and the method used in this study. The balance of the paper reviews our results relative to user behavior. 'Among the issues discussed are the following: the duration and frequency of terminal sessions; the use of language processors; command usage; and user re- sponse time and its determinants