Dynamic witnesses for static type errors (or, ill-typed programs usually go wrong)
Abstract
Static type errors are a common stumbling block for newcomers to typed functional languages. We present a dynamic approach to explaining type errors by generating counterexample witness inputs that illustrate how an ill-typed program goes wrong. First, given an ill-typed function, we symbolically execute the body to synthesize witness values that make the program go wrong. We prove that our procedure synthesizes general witnesses in that if a witness is found, then for all inhabited input types, there exist values that can make the function go wrong. Second, we show how to extend the above procedure to produce a reduction graph that can be used to interactively visualize and debug witness executions. Third, we evaluate the coverage of our approach on two data sets comprising over 4,500 ill-typed student programs. Our technique is able to generate witnesses for 88% of the programs, and our reduction graph yields small counterexamples for 81% of the witnesses. Finally, we evaluate whether our witnesses help students understand and fix type errors, and find that students presented with our witnesses show a greater understanding of type errors than those presented with a standard error message.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Sep 04, 2016
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3022670.2951915
Entities
People
- Eric L. Seidel
- Ranjit Jhala
- Westley Weimer
Organizations
- National Science Foundation
- United States Air Force
- University of California, San Diego
- University of Virginia