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The effectiveness of a type checking tool strongly depends on the accuracy of the positional information that is associated with type errors.
We present an approach where the location associated with an error message e is defined as a slice Pe of the program being type checked.
We show that this approach yields highly accurate positional information: Pe is a program that contains precisely those program constructs in P that caused error e. Semantically, we have the interesting property that type checking Pe is guaranteed to produce the same error e.
Our approach is completely language-dependent, and has been implemented for a significant subset of Pascal.
By: T. B. Dinesh, Frank Tip
Published in: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology , volume 10, (no 1), pages 5-55 in 2001
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