Novice Programming Errors: Misconceptions or Misrepresentations?

H. Christiaen

In recent articles a lot of attention ha s been paid to the way novices learn programming. Several research projects try to identify the misconceptions which underlie the errors of novice programmers [4,5,6]. The thesis of this contribution is that errors of novices may also be caused by leaps in the presentation of the topic by the experts. This is illustrated by the treatment of the frequently used example of reading a series of data up to a sentinel value.