PH-Helper - a Syntax-Directed Editor for Hoshimi Programming Language, HL

Abstract

It is well known that students face many difficulties when they have to learn programming.  Generally, these difficulties arise from two main reasons: i) the kind of exercises proposed by the teacher, and ii) the programming language used for solving those problems. The first problem is overcome by selecting an interesting application domain for the students.  The second problem is tackled by using programming languages specialized for teaching.

Nowadays, there are many programming languages aimed at simplifying the learning process.  However, many of them still have the same drawbacks of traditional programming languages: the language used to write the statements is different from the programmers' native language; and the syntactic rules impose many tricky restrictions not easy to follow.

This paper presents an approach for solving the problems previously mentioned.  The approach consists of using: an application domain motivating for the student, the Project Hoshimi (PH); and a programming environment, PH-Helper that is a simple and user-friendly syntax-directed editor and compiler for Hoshimi Language (HL), the actual PH programming language.