A PRACTICAL MINIMUM DISTANCE METHOD FOR SYNTAX ERROR HANDLING

We present a method for recovering for syntax errors encountered durin g parsing. The method provides a form of minimum distance repair, has linear time complexity, and is completely automatic. A formal method i s presented for evaluating the performance of error recovery methods, based on global minimum-distance error correction. The minimum-distanc e error recovery method achieves a theoretically best performance on 8 0% of Pascal programs in the weighted Ripley-Druseikis collection. Com parisons of performance with other error recovery methods are given.