Rafael Caballero
ABSTRACT
Debugging is one of the essential parts of the software development cycle. However, the usual debugging techniques used in imperative languages such as the step by step execution often are not suitable for debugging declarative programming languages. We present here a graphical debugging environment for constraint lazy functional-logic programs based on declarative debugging. The debugger displays the computation tree associated with a computation which has produced an incorrect answer, and navigates it with the assistance of the user until the error, an incorrect program rule, is found out. The debugger supports programs including equality and disequality constraints.
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Index Terms
- A declarative debugger of incorrect answers for constraint functional-logic programs
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Reviews
Hans J. Schneider
The idea of declarative debugging is to generate a computation tree and locate a node whose result is incorrect, but has correct results at all of its children nodes. This paper presents a (pseudo-)graphical system supporting the user in finding a buggy node. Section 2 summarizes the constraint functional language TOY (with lazy semantics and pattern matching). In the next section, the author briefly defines the computation tree and discusses its simplification to reduce the number of questions the user must answer. The debugger is based on a transformed program that returns the computation tree in addition to the result. This transformation is described in section 4. Then, Caballero reviews a debugging session. The user can navigate through the tree, change the validity of nodes, remove valid subtrees, and so on, until the debugger is able to indicate the function definition that seems to be the cause of the error. In section 6, the author discusses some efficiency issues. Whereas the number of questions can be suitably reduced by the divide-and-query strategy, the memory overhead is the major drawback and restricts the application of the present system to small examples. The paper is clearly written, and is an interesting contribution to debugging functional programs. The reader gets a good impression of the running system and its limits. Online Computing Reviews Service
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