We propose ‘Trace View’, a static visualization method for monitoring and debugging the dynamic behavior of programs written in data flow visual programming languages. Trace View presents a hierarchical structure of the data flow between nodes that is created over the execution time of the program. The view also serves as an interface that allows the programmer to select a data stream link when...

In this paper, we propose to apply declarative debugging to Datalog programs. Our approach relies on program semantics rather than on the computation mechanism. The debugging process starts when the user detects an unexpected answer. By asking questions about the intended semantics, the debugger looks for incorrect program relations. While usual declarative debuggers for other languages are bas...

Slicing is a well-established program analysis technique that has applications in debugging, program understanding and model reduction. This paper presents an approach to slicing formal specifications based on communicating extended automata.

In this paper, we describe the process-level debugger of GRAPE, our hierarchical graphical programming environment for concurrent programs. Its unique feature is that it clearly separates the identification of erroneous processes, which we call process-level debugging, from the exact localisation of the bug at the source-level. This divide-and-conquer approach is absolutely necessary for debugg...

The capacity and programmability of reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs has improved steadily over the years, but they do not readily provide any mechanisms for monitoring or debugging running programs. Such mechanisms need to be written into the program itself. This is done using ad hoc methods and primitive tools when compared to CPU programming. This complicates the programming and debuggi...

Debugging lazy functional programs poses serious challenges. In support of the “stop, examine, and resume” debugging style of imperative languages, some debugging tools abandon lazy evaluation. Other debuggers preserve laziness but present it in a way that may confuse programmers because the focus of evaluation jumps around in a seemingly random manner. In this paper, we introduce a supplementa...

Declarative debuggers are semi-automatic debugging tools that abstract the execution details to focus on the program semantics. Erroneous computations are represented by suitable trees, which are traversed by asking questions to the user until a bug is found. This paper applies declarative debugging to the sequential subset of the language Erlang. The debugger takes the intermediate representat...

The ability to debug existing code is an important skill to develop in student programmers. However, debugging may not receive the same amount of explicit teaching attention as other material and the main expression of debugging competence is students’ ability to undo problems which they themselves have injected into their assignments. Further, as the literature points out, debugging skills do ...

We introduce a framework for interactive stepping through an answerset program as a means for debugging. In procedural languages, stepping is a widespread and effective debugging strategy. The idea is to gain insight into the behaviour of a program by executing statement by statement, following the program’s control flow. Stepping has not been considered for answer-set programs so far, presumab...

Faults need to be identified, localized, and removed from programs. Empirical studies show that coverage-based faults localizations effectively target bugs, even in the presence of multiple faults. Debugging is a time-consuming activity and thus it is beneficial to accelerate the process by employing appropriate techniques. The need for speeding up the debugging process is even more immense whe...