Abstract
We explore the idea of basing declarative debugging on the search for buggy textual formulas in the program, rather than on the search for computed buggy formula instances. The motivation is to build declarative debuggers requiring less oracle queries, at the cost of loosing information about the variable bindings of the diagnosis. This new approach we call declarative source debugging, as opposed to declarative execution debugging.
A motivating example for pure Prolog is given, consisting of an append computation with a wrong solution. Afterwards we present a declarative source debugging algorithm, and simulate it on some other examples. Under an (aparently reasonable) assumption the number of queries needed to derive a diagnosis is logarithmic with the number of program source clauses, rather than with the number of derivation nodes as in conventional declarative debugging, when using no case-dependent information.
Our conclusions carry over easily to other bug symptom types not exemplified and to impure Prolog, by adopting the conceptual framework of [Pereira Calejo 88, 89] and thereby uniformizing their treatment. This is reported in [Calejo 91].
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References
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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Calejo, M., Pereira, L.M. (1991). Declarative source debugging. In: Barahona, P., Moniz Pereira, L., Porto, A. (eds) EPIA 91. EPIA 1991. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 541. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-54535-2_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-54535-2_37
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