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Sprinter: A Didactic Linter for Structured Programming

Authors Francisco Alfredo, André L. Santos , Nuno Garrido

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Author Details

Francisco Alfredo
  • Visor.ai Portugal, S.A., Lisbon, Portugal
André L. Santos
  • ISTAR-IUL, University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal
Nuno Garrido
  • ISCTE-IUL, IT-IUL, University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal

Funding

This work was partially supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT) [ISTAR Projects: UIDB/04466/2020 and UIDP/04466/2020]. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Cite As Get BibTex

Francisco Alfredo, André L. Santos, and Nuno Garrido. Sprinter: A Didactic Linter for Structured Programming. In Third International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2022). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 102, pp. 2:1-2:8, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.ICPEC.2022.2

Abstract

Code linters are tools for detecting improper uses of programming constructs and violations of style issues. Despite that professional linters are available for numerous languages, they are not targeted to introductory programming, given their prescriptive nature that does not take into consideration a didactic viewpoint of learning programming fundamentals. We present Sprinter, a didactic code linter for structured programming supporting Java whose novelty aspects are twofold: (a) providing formative feedback on code with comprehensive explanatory messages (rather then prescriptive); (b) capability of detecting some control-flow issues to a deeper extent than professional linters. We review Sprinter features against popular tools, namely IntelliJ IDEA and Sonarlint.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Social and professional topics → Computer science education
  • Applied computing → Interactive learning environments
Keywords
  • structured programming
  • code quality
  • code linter

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References

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