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Direct Manipulation for Imperative Programs

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Book cover Static Analysis (SAS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11822))

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Abstract

Direct manipulation is a programming paradigm in which the programmer conveys the intended program behavior by modifying program values at runtime. The programming environment then finds a modification of the original program that yields the manipulated values. In this paper, we propose the first framework for direct manipulation of imperative programs. First, we introduce direct state manipulation, which allows programmers to visualize the trace of a buggy program on an input, and modify variable values at a location. Second, we propose a synthesis technique based on program sketching and quantitative objectives to efficiently find the “closest” program to the original one that is consistent with the manipulated values. We formalize the problem and build a tool JDial based on the Sketch synthesizer. We investigate the effectiveness of direct manipulation by using JDial to fix benchmarks from introductory programming assignments. In our evaluation, we observe that direct state manipulations are an effective specification mechanism: even when provided with a single state manipulation, JDial can produce desired program modifications for 66% of our benchmarks while techniques based only on test cases always fail.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We assume that the length of the trace in the synthesized program is at most twice the length of the original trace and we use this assumption to initialize the length of the arrays. This constant is parametric and can be modified.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by NSF under grants CNS-1763871, CCF-1704117 and CCF-1846327; and by the UW-Madison OVRGE with funding from WARF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

    Qinheping Hu & Loris D’Antoni

  2. Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

    Roopsha Samanta

  3. Google, Hanover, USA

    Rishabh Singh

Authors
  1. Qinheping Hu
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  2. Roopsha Samanta
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  3. Rishabh Singh
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  4. Loris D’Antoni
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Loris D’Antoni .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Bor-Yuh Evan Chang

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Hu, Q., Samanta, R., Singh, R., D’Antoni, L. (2019). Direct Manipulation for Imperative Programs. In: Chang, BY. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11822. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32304-2_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32304-2_17

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