Abstract
Reversible debugging is becoming increasingly popular for locating the source of errors. This technique proposes a more natural approach to debugging, where one can explore a computation from the observable misbehaviour backwards to the source of the error. In this work, we propose a reversible debugging scheme for logic programs. For this purpose, we define an appropriate instrumented semantics (a so-called Landauer embedding) that makes SLD resolution reversible. An implementation of a reversible debugger for Prolog, rever, has been developed and is publicly available.
This paper is dedicated to Manuel Hermenegildo on his 60th birthday, for his many contributions to logic programming as well as his energetic leadership within the community. I wish him many springs more to come.
This work has been partially supported by grant PID2019-104735RB-C41 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant Prometeo/2019/098 (DeepTrust), and by the COST Action IC1405 on Reversible Computation - extending horizons of computing.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, we only consider Prolog’s computation rule, so that the selected atom in a query is always the leftmost one.
- 2.
We consider Prolog notation in examples (so variables start with an uppercase letter). Clauses are labelled with a unique identifier of the form \(\ell _i\).
- 3.
Here, \((A,H,m)\!:\!\mathcal{H}\) denotes a list with head element (A, H, m) and tail \(\mathcal{H}\).
- 4.
For clarity, we only show the bindings for the variables in the initial query. Moreover, the steps are labelled with the applied rule.
- 5.
For simplicity, we assume that the same renamed clauses are considered in both derivations.
- 6.
The subscripts of some configurations: call, exit, fail, redo, and answer, can be ignored for now. They will become useful in the next section.
- 7.
As is common, |S| denotes the cardinality of the set or sequence S.
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Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the editors, John Gallagher, Roberto Giacobazzi and Pedro López-García, for the opportunity to contribute to this volume, dedicated to Manuel Hermenegildo on the occasion of his 60th birthday.
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Vidal, G. (2023). Reversible Debugging in Logic Programming. In: Lopez-Garcia, P., Gallagher, J.P., Giacobazzi, R. (eds) Analysis, Verification and Transformation for Declarative Programming and Intelligent Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13160. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31476-6_15
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