Article

Introducing debugging capabilities to natural semantics

Authors:

Alberto de la Encina,

Fernando RubioAuthors Info & Claims

PSI'06: Proceedings of the 6th international Andrei Ershov memorial conference on Perspectives of systems informatics

Pages 195 - 208

Published: 27 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Reasoning about functional programs is simpler than reasoning about their imperative counterparts. However, finding bugs in lazy functional languages has been more complex until quite recently. The reason was that not much work was done on developing practical debuggers. Fortunately, several debuggers exist nowadays. One of the easiest to use Haskell debuggers is Hood, whose behavior is based on the concept of observation of intermediate data structures. However, although using Hood can be simple when observing some structures, it is known that it can be hard to understand how it works when dealing with complex situations.

In this paper, we formalize the behavior of the Hood debugger by extending Sestoft's natural semantics. Moreover, we also indicate how to derive an abstract machine including such debugging information. By doing so, we do not only provide a formal foundation, but we also provide an alternative method to implement debuggers. In fact, we have already implemented a prototype of the abstract machine commented in this paper.

References

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Cited By

de la Encina ALlana LRubio FHidalgo-Herrero MLeuschel MPodelski A(2007)Observing intermediate structures in a parallel lazy functional languageProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming10.1145/1273920.1273935(109-120)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1273920.1273935

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Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

PSI'06: Proceedings of the 6th international Andrei Ershov memorial conference on Perspectives of systems informatics

June 2006

496 pages

ISBN:9783540708803

Editors:
Irina Virbitskaite
A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia
,
Andrei Voronkov
University of Manchester, Department of Computer Science, Manchester, UK

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 27 June 2006

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Cited By

de la Encina ALlana LRubio FHidalgo-Herrero MLeuschel MPodelski A(2007)Observing intermediate structures in a parallel lazy functional languageProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming10.1145/1273920.1273935(109-120)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1273920.1273935

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