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A Declarative Debugger for Sequential Erlang Programs

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Tests and Proofs (TAP 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7942))

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Abstract

Declarative debuggers are semi-automatic debugging tools that abstract the execution details to focus on the program semantics. Erroneous computations are represented by suitable trees, which are traversed by asking questions to the user until a bug is found. This paper applies declarative debugging to the sequential subset of the language Erlang. The debugger takes the intermediate representation generated by Erlang systems, known as Core Erlang, and an initial error detected by the user, and locates an erroneous program function responsible for the error. In order to represent the erroneous computation, a semantic calculus for sequential Core Erlang programs is proposed. The debugger uses an abbreviation of the proof trees of this calculus as debugging trees, which allows us to prove the soundness of the approach. The technique has been implemented in a debugger tool publicly available.

Research supported by MICINN Spanish projects StrongSoft (TIN2012-39391-C04-04), FAST-STAMP (TIN2008-06622-C03-01) and LEVITY (TIN2008-06622-C03-02), Comunidad de Madrid program PROMETIDOS (S2009/TIC-1465), and Generalitat Valenciana program PROMETEO (2011/052). Salvador Tamarit was partially supported by MICINN Spanish FPI grant (BES-2009-015019).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Rafael Caballero, Enrique Martin-Martin & Adrián Riesco

  2. Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain

    Salvador Tamarit

Authors
  1. Rafael Caballero
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  2. Enrique Martin-Martin
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  3. Adrián Riesco
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  4. Salvador Tamarit
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, 98052-5321, Redmond, WA, USA

    Margus Veanes

  2. Università di Verona, 37134, Verona, Italy

    Luca Viganò

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Caballero, R., Martin-Martin, E., Riesco, A., Tamarit, S. (2013). A Declarative Debugger for Sequential Erlang Programs. In: Veanes, M., Viganò, L. (eds) Tests and Proofs. TAP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7942. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38916-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38916-0_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38915-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38916-0

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