ViMer: a visual debugger for mercury

  • Authors:
  • M. Cameron;M. García de la Banda;K. Marriott;P. Moulder

  • Affiliations:
  • Monash University, Australia;Monash University, Australia;Monash University, Australia;Monash University, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declaritive programming
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

ViMer is a visual debugging environment for Mercury programs which has three main contributions. First, it employs a new execution tree representation, the layered AND-OR tree, which we believe provides a better way of visualizing backtracking in AND-OR-like trees. Second, it uses incremental constraint-solving to efficiently draw and incrementally update the visualization of the execution tree. And finally, it borrows techniques from standard tracers (such as the use of spy points to reduce the amount of tree nodes, and the placement of restrictions on the amount of information stored at each node) that help keep the tool efficient while still providing enough information for debugging.