[External] : Re: Error examples page

[Ethan McCue]

Also coming out of some of the other discussions[1][2] I think there is one
table from a paper[3] that feels relevant to the discussion.

| Compiler Error Message                | n     | %     |
|---------------------------------------|-------|-------|
| cannot find symbol                    | 4,614 | 16.0% |
| ‘)’ expected                          | 3,317 | 11.5% |
| ‘;’ expected                          | 3,076 | 10.7% |
| not a statement                       | 2,142 | 7.4%  |
| illegal start of expression           | 1,825 | 6.3%  |
| reached end of file while parsing     | 1,406 | 4.9%  |
| illegal start of type                 | 1,316 | 4.6%  |
| ‘else’ without ‘if’                   | 1,141 | 4.0%  |
| bad operand types for binary operator | 1,138 | 3.9%  |
| <identifier> expected                 | 1,091 | 3.8%  |

This shows the frequency at which their sample of students ran into
different errors.[4]



[1]:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/15qzny5/better_java_compiler_error_messages/
[2]:
https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/15qzkh9/better_java_compiler_error_messages/
[3]:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GUj-KQMzWhuWTk7ksAIgABKiGkHseHQL/view?usp=sharing
[4]: I don't know whether this generalizes to the language as it will exist
in the future or whether that particular paper is reliable, but it's a
start.

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