Content area

Abstract

Motivated by experience in programming and in the teaching of programming, we make another assault on the longstanding problem of debugging. Having explored why debuggers are not used as widely as one might expect, especially in functional programming environments, we define the characteristics of a debugger which make it usable and thus likely to be widely used. We present work on a new debugger for the functional programming language OCaml which operates by direct interpretation of the program source, allowing the printing out of individual steps of the program's evaluation, and discuss its technical implementation and practical use. It has two parts: a stand-alone debugger which can run OCaml programs by interpretation and so allow their behaviour to be inspected; and an OCaml syntax extension, which allows the part of a program under scrutiny to be interpreted in the same fashion as the stand-alone debugger whilst the rest of the program runs natively. We show how this latter mechanism can create a source-level debugging system that has the characteristics of a usable debugger and so may eventually be expected to be suitable for widespread adoption.

Details

1009240
Identifier / keyword
Title
Debugging Functional Programs by Interpretation
Publication title
arXiv.org; Ithaca
Publication year
2024
Publication date
Nov 1, 2024
Section
Computer Science
Publisher
Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
Source
arXiv.org
Place of publication
Ithaca
Country of publication
United States
University/institution
Cornell University Library arXiv.org
e-ISSN
2331-8422
Source type
Working Paper
Language of publication
English
Document type
Working Paper
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2024-11-04
Milestone dates
2024-11-01 (Submission v1)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
04 Nov 2024
ProQuest document ID
3123920112
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/debugging-functional-programs-interpretation/docview/3123920112/se-2?accountid=208611
Full text outside of ProQuest
Copyright
© 2024. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2024-11-05
Database
ProQuest One Academic