Learning to debug is a difficult, yet essential, aspect of learning to program. Students in this multi-institutional study report that finding bugs is harder than fixing them. They use a wide variety of debugging strategies, some of them unexpected. Time spent on understanding the problem can be effective. Pattern matching, particularly at the…

Study results indicate that it is feasible to develop automatic name recognition algorithms to distinguish character strings representing names from other character strings occurring in English language titles. This finding offers cautious promise for alleviating some of the labor intensive work of cataloging. (16 references) (Author/SD)

Describes the language learning program "Acquire," which is a sample of grammar induction. It is a learning algorithm based on a pattern-matching scheme, using both a positive and negative network to reduce overgeneration. Language learning programs may be useful as tutorials for learning the syntax of a foreign language. (Author/LMO)