Beginners of a programming language sometimes lack syntactic knowledge to correct syntax errors in their programs. They repeat the same mistakes unless missing knowledge is given. We classified beginner’s syntax errors by supposed causes of the errors; knowledge shortage and carelessness, and implemented a support system for syntax errors.
In this paper, we present the support system that gives error messages including syntax knowledge to a learner of Prolog. This support system identifies the Prolog syntax errors by matching with 65 bug patterns. We evaluated the support system by comparing classes using this support and classes not using it. As a result, the syntax errors supported by error messages with syntax knowledge have decreased greatly in the supported classes compared with the unsupported classes. On the other hand, the syntax errors supported by messages with no knowledge have hardly decreased.
