Evaluating environments for functional programming

This paper presents a novel program editor, C Y NTHIA, for the functional programming language ML. Motivated by the current lack of good programming environments for functional programming, C Y NTHIA incorporates programming by analogy | whereby users write programs by applying abstract transformations to existing programs | and sophisticated correctness-checking techniques such as checking for semantic errors and non-termination. C Y NTHIA has been used in two introductory courses in ML and the results of these evaluations are presented here. It was found that students using C Y NTHIA committed fewer errors than students using a compiler / text editor approach. In addition, errors that were made could be corrected more easily.