A Framework for Interpreting Traces of Functional Logic Computations

This paper is part of a comprehensive approach to debugging for functional logic languages. The basic idea of the whole project is to trace the execution of functional logic programs by side effects and then give different views on the recorded data. In this way well known debugging techniques like declarative debugging, expression observation, redex trailing but also step-by-step debuggers and cost center oriented symbolic profiling can be implemented as special views on the recorded data. In addition, creating new views for special debugging purposes should be easy to implement. This is where the contribution of this work sets in. We describe how the recorded data is interpreted and preprocessed in order to yield an extremely simple yet versatile interface to base the different views on. Using this interface, formulating the basic functionality of declarative debugging, for example, is a matter of a few lines.