Programming Errors in Traversal Programs Over Structured Data

Traversal strategies provide an established means of describing automated queries, analyses, transformations, and other non-trivial computations on deeply structured data (including, most notably, data representations of software artifacts such as programs). The resulting traversal programs are prone to programming errors. We are specifically concerned with errors that go beyond classic type errors, in particular: (i) divergence of traversal, (ii) unintentional extent of traversal into data, (iii) trivial traversal results, (iv) inapplicability of the constituents of a traversal program along traversal. We deliver a taxonomy of programming errors, and start attacking some of them by refinements of traversal programming.