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Practical syntactic error recovery in compilers

Authors:

Susan L. Graham,

Steven P. RhodesAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '73: Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 52 - 58

https://doi.org/10.1145/512927.512932

Published: 01 October 1973 Publication History

Abstract

A substantial portion of any programmer's time is spent in debugging. One of the major services of any compiler ought to be to provide as much information as possible about compile-time errors in order to minimize the time required for debugging. A good error detection and recovery scheme should maximize the number of errors detected but minimize the number of times it reports an error when there is none. These spurious error detections and their associated error messages are usually engendered by an inappropriate recovery action.In this paper we describe a recovery scheme for syntax errors which provides high quality recovery with good diagnostic information at relatively low cost. In addition, implementation of the recovery scheme can be automated - that is, the recovery routine can be created by a parser-generator. Therefore, the compiler designer need not be burdened with the difficulties of error recovery and the programming effort necessary to design and debug a myriad of ad hoc recovery routines.

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Bauer, H. R., Becker, S., Graham, S. L., and Satterthwaite, E. "Algol W Language Description," Technical Report CS 110 Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, Ca., Sept. 1969.]]

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cover image ACM Conferences

POPL '73: Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

October 1973

242 pages

ISBN:9781450373494

DOI:10.1145/512927

Conference Chair:
Patrick C. Fischer
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
,
Program Chair:
Jeffrey D. Ullman
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540

Copyright © 1973 ACM.

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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Published: 01 October 1973

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POPL '73 Paper Acceptance Rate 22 of 100 submissions, 22%;

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