Dynamic slicing based on redex trails

• Authors: Claudio Ochoa;Josep Silva;Germán Vidal
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation
• Year: 2004

Tracing computations is a widely used methodology for program debugging. Lazy languages, in particular, pose new demands on tracing techniques since following the actual trace of a computation is generally useless. Typically, they rely on the construction of a redex trail, a graph that describes the reductions of a computation and its relationships. While tracing provides a significant help for locating bugs, the task still remains complex. A well-known debugging technique for imperative programs is based on dynamic slicing, a method to find the program statements that influence the computation of a value for a specific program input.In this work, we introduce a novel technique for dynamic slicing in lazy functional logic languages. Rather than starting from scratch, our technique relies on (a slight extension of) redex trails. We provide a method to compute a correct and minimal dynamic slice from the redex trail of a computation. A clear advantage of our proposal is that one can enhance existing tracers with slicing capabilities with a modest implementation effort, since the same data structure (the redex trail) can be used for both tracing and slicing.