The art of computer programming, volume 3: (2nd ed.) sorting and searching
The art of computer programming, volume 3: (2nd ed.) sorting and searching
Control structures for programming languages
Control structures for programming languages
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The research underlying this report is concerned with improving the lot of the programmer in debugging, analyzing and modelling his, or others', programs. It is my belief that the area of “execution analysis tools” has been neglected in the formative stages of system planning in contemporary systems. This has led to the design of many software and hardware “probes”, “performance monitors”, debugging aids, etc. which have been forced to work with uncooperative hardware and operating systems. The state of the art is especially inadequate in on-line debugging and analysis tools. Witness, for example, the difficulties of backtracking, or tracing the values of a set of core locations, or determining all the successors of a particular node in a program (a node being defined in some intuitive sense for the time being), except in several machine-simulator based systems (see (9) for some good examples). In a survey (1) of on-line debugging techniques in 1966, Evans and Darley remark that computer use is becoming “debugging-limited” rather than limited by memory size or processor speed. They further predict that this will be the state of affairs until methods for proving that programs have certain properties are successfully developed and come into wide use. I quite agree with that evaluation and further envision that “high-level execution analysis” tools will become a staple in future software engineering laboratories.