Debugging tools are a practical need for helping programmers to understand why their programs do not work as intended. Declarative programming paradigms involving complex operational details, such as constraint solving and lazy evaluation, do not fit well to traditional debugging techniques relying on the inspection of low-level computation traces. As a solution to this problem, and following a...

Debuggers are critical tools for the software development. The design and implementation of a source-level debugging system that enables the HPF programmer to observe the behavior of the program at the level at which the program has been developed presents unique challenges. The main requirement put on an HPF debugger is to observe and control the state of many processors, to summarize and pres...

This paper documents the design of an experiment to test a debugging oracle assistant. A debugging oracle is responsible for judging correctness of program parts or program states. A programmer usually acts as a debugging oracle. The goal of a debugging oracle assistant is to improve the programmer’s speed and accuracy. Factors that complicate our design process include: (1) programmer variabil...

Bidirectional debugging is a promising and powerful debugging technique that can help programmers backtrack and find the causes of program errors faster. A key component of bidirectional debugging is checkpointing, which allows the debugger to restore the program to any previously encountered state, but can incur significant performance and memory overheads that can render bidirectional debuggi...

In this paper, we propose a mathematical framework for automated bug localization. This framework can be briefly summarized as follows. A program execution can be represented as a rooted acyclic directed graph. We define an execution snapshot by a cut-set on the graph. A program state can be regarded as a conjunction of labels on edges in a cut-set. Then we argue that a debugging task is a prun...

As most parallel and distributed programs are internally non-deterministic – consecutive runs with the same input might result in a different program flow – vanilla cyclic debugging techniques as such are useless. In order to use cyclic debugging tools, we need a tool that records information about an execution so that it can be replayed for debugging. Because recording information interferes w...

We introduce an interactive procedural-style debugging approach for answer-set programs that avoids the negative aspects of non-declarative debugging of ASP. It is based on an intuitive computation model that allows a user to follow his or her intuition by stepwise determining which applicable rules are considered to be supporting rules. Moreover, we define the notion of a breakpoint for answer...

Inspections and testing are two fault detection techniques used to find faults in software programs. In the area of cognitive science, testing is often referred to as debugging, which also could consist of finding faults after compiling. In this report debugging is used as the technique to find faults when one knows that a fault exists in the program. The debugging strategy is often preceeded b...

Traces of program executions tell how programs behave in given cases. They are a helpful source of information for automated debugging. Opium is an automated trace analyser for Prolog programs. It is programmable and extendable. It provides a trace query language and abstract views of executions as a basis for automated debugging. Opium has shown its capabilities to build abstract tracers and a...

This paper describes the debugger that we are developing as part of the FIELD programming environment. FIELD requires a powerful and flexible debugging framework to facilitate new tools for program and data visualization and for multiple-view programming. Traditional debuggers are too limited to easily fulfill this roll. We are developing a debugger, SDT, that is actually a powerful programming...