Abstract
Declarative debugging is a semi-automatic debugging technique that abstracts the execution details to focus on results. This technique builds a debugging tree representing an incorrect computation and traverses it by asking questions to the user until the error is found. In previous works we have presented a declarative debugger for Maude specifications. Besides a programming language, Maude is a semantic framework where several other languages can be specified. However, our declarative debugger is only able to find errors in Maude specifications, so it cannot find bugs on the programs written on the languages being specified. We study in this paper how to modify our declarative debugger to find this kind of errors when defining programming languages using big-step and small-step semantics, two generic approaches that allow to specify a wide range of languages in a natural way. We obtain our debugging trees by modifying the proof trees obtained from the semantic rules. We have extended our declarative debugger to deal with this kind of debugging, and we illustrate it with an example.
Research supported by MICINN Spanish project StrongSoft (TIN2012-39391-C04-04) and Comunidad de Madrid program PROMETIDOS (S2009/TIC-1465).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bouhoula, A., Jouannaud, J.-P., Meseguer, J.: Specification and proof in membership equational logic. Theoretical Computer Science 236, 35–132 (2000)
Caballero, R.: A declarative debugger of incorrect answers for constraint functional-logic programs. In: Antoy, S., Hanus, M. (eds.) Proc. of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Curry and Functional Logic Programming, WCFLP 2005, Tallinn, Estonia, pp. 8–13. ACM Press (2005)
Caballero, R., Hermanns, C., Kuchen, H.: Algorithmic debugging of Java programs. In: López-Fraguas, F. (ed.) Proc. of the 15th Workshop on Functional and (Constraint) Logic Programming, WFLP 2006, Madrid, Spain. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 177, pp. 75–89. Elsevier (2007)
Clavel, M., Durán, F., Eker, S., Lincoln, P., Martí-Oliet, N., Meseguer, J., Talcott, C.: All About Maude - A High-Performance Logical Framework. LNCS, vol. 4350. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Şerbănuţă, T.F., Roşu, G.: K-Maude: A rewriting based tool for semantics of programming languages. In: Ölveczky, P.C. (ed.) WRLA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6381, pp. 104–122. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Hennessy, M.: The Semantics of Programming Languages: An Elementary Introduction Using Structural Operational Semantics. John Wiley & Sons (1990)
Insa, D., Silva, J., Tomás, C.: Enhancing declarative debugging with loop expansion and tree compression. In: Albert, E. (ed.) LOPSTR 2012. LNCS, vol. 7844, pp. 71–88. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
MacLarty, I.: Practical declarative debugging of Mercury programs. Master’s thesis, University of Melbourne (2005)
Meseguer, J.: Conditional rewriting logic as a unified model of concurrency. Theoretical Computer Science 96(1), 73–155 (1992)
Naish, L.: Declarative diagnosis of missing answers. New Generation Computing 10(3), 255–286 (1992)
Nilsson, H.: How to look busy while being as lazy as ever: the implementation of a lazy functional debugger. Journal of Functional Programming 11(6), 629–671 (2001)
Pope, B.: A Declarative Debugger for Haskell. PhD thesis, The University of Melbourne, Australia (2006)
Riesco, A.: Using semantics specified in Maude to generate test cases. In: Roychoudhury, A., D’Souza, M. (eds.) ICTAC 2012. LNCS, vol. 7521, pp. 90–104. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Riesco, A., Verdejo, A., Martí-Oliet, N., Caballero, R.: Declarative debugging of rewriting logic specifications. Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming 81(7-8), 851–897 (2012)
Shapiro, E.Y.: Algorithmic Program Debugging. ACM Distinguished Dissertation. MIT Press (1983)
Tessier, A., Ferrand, G.: Declarative diagnosis in the CLP scheme. In: Deransart, P., Małuszyński, J. (eds.) DiSCiPl 1999. LNCS, vol. 1870, pp. 151–174. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Verdejo, A., Martí-Oliet, N.: Executable structural operational semantics in Maude. Technical Report 134-03, Dpto. Sistemas Informáticos y Programación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2003)
Verdejo, A., Martí-Oliet, N.: Executable structural operational semantics in Maude. Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming 67, 226–293 (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Riesco, A. (2014). Using Big-Step and Small-Step Semantics in Maude to Perform Declarative Debugging. In: Codish, M., Sumii, E. (eds) Functional and Logic Programming. FLOPS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8475. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07151-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07151-0_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07150-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07151-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)