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CHRAnimation: An Animation Tool for Constraint Handling Rules

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Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8981))

Abstract

Visualization tools of different languages offer its users with a needed set of features allowing them to animate how programs of such languages work. Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is currently used as a general purpose language. This results in having complex programs with CHR. Nevertheless, CHR is still lacking on visualization tools. With Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) being a high-level rule-based language, animating CHR programs through animation tools demonstrates the power of the language. Such tools are useful for beginners to the language as well as programmers of sophisticated algorithms. This paper continues upon the efforts made to have a generic visualization platform for CHR using source-to-source transformation. It also provides a new visualization feature that enables viewing all the possible solutions of a CHR program instead of the don’t care nondeterminism used in most CHR implementations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The tracer is able to handle the problem of having multiple Jawaa objects with the same name by removing the old object having the same name before adding the new one. This is possible even if the removed head constraint was not communicated.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The German University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

    Nada Sharaf & Slim Abdennadher

  2. Ulm University, Ulm, Germany

    Thom Frühwirth

Authors
  1. Nada Sharaf
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  2. Slim Abdennadher
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  3. Thom Frühwirth
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nada Sharaf .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IASI-CNR, Rome, Italy

    Maurizio Proietti

  2. Nagoya Institute of Technology, Nagoya, Japan

    Hirohisa Seki

Appendices

Appendix

A Annotations

The bubble sort program’s annotations use node as a basic object. The x-coordinate is calculated through the index and the height uses the value.

figure p

For the \(n\)queens problem, the first set of annotations are the rectangles produced by the object “board” which users can choose through the interface. The number of vertical and horizontal squares (\(4\) in our case), the initial x and y-coordinates (\(30\) and \(30\) in our case), the squares’ widths (\(30\) in this case) in addition to the color chosen by the user automatically produces 16 associations for the solve constraint. The below constraints represent the rectangles that form the first two rows of the board and the two annotations for the in constraint.

figure q

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Sharaf, N., Abdennadher, S., Frühwirth, T. (2015). CHRAnimation: An Animation Tool for Constraint Handling Rules. In: Proietti, M., Seki, H. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8981. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17822-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17822-6_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17821-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17822-6

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