Investigating the Difficulty of Commercial-level Compiler Warning Messages for Novice Programmers

Yoshitaka Kojima, Yoshitaka Arahori, Katsuhiko Gondow

2015

Abstract

Many researchers refer to the folklore “warning messages in commercial-level compilers like GCC are difficult for novice programmers, which leads to low learning efficiency.” However, there is little quantitative investigation about this, so it is still unknown if (and to what extent) the warning messages are really difficult. In this paper, we provide a quantitative investigation about the difficulty of the warning messages. More specifically, as a sample code set we first collected 90 small programs in C language that are error-prone for novice programmers. Then we performed the investigation on the warning emission and its difficulty for 4 compilers and 5 static analysis tools, which are all commercial-level, using the sample code set. The difficulty of warning messages were evaluated by 7 students as research participants, using 4 evaluation criteria of clarity, specificity, constructive guidance, and plain terminology. As a result, we obtained several important quantitative findings: e.g., the deviation of warning emission presence in compilers and static analysis tools is large; and 35.7% of warning messages lack clarity, and 35.9% of warning messages lack specificity, which suggests roughly one third of warning messages are difficult for novice programmers to understand.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kojima Y., Arahori Y. and Gondow K. (2015). Investigating the Difficulty of Commercial-level Compiler Warning Messages for Novice Programmers . In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-108-3, pages 483-490. DOI: 10.5220/0005437404830490

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu15,
author={Yoshitaka Kojima and Yoshitaka Arahori and Katsuhiko Gondow},
title={Investigating the Difficulty of Commercial-level Compiler Warning Messages for Novice Programmers},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU,},
year={2015},
pages={483-490},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005437404830490},
isbn={978-989-758-108-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU,
TI - Investigating the Difficulty of Commercial-level Compiler Warning Messages for Novice Programmers
SN - 978-989-758-108-3
AU - Kojima Y.
AU - Arahori Y.
AU - Gondow K.
PY - 2015
SP - 483
EP - 490
DO - 10.5220/0005437404830490