AUI - the Debugger and Assertion Checker for the Awk Programming Language

This paper describes the design of Awk User Interface (AUI). AUI is a graphical programming environment for editing, running, testing and debugging of Awk programs. The AUI environment supports tracing of Awk programs, setting breakpoints, and inspection of variable values. An assertion language to describe relationship between input and output of Awk program is provided. Assertions can be checked after the program run, and if violated, informative and readable messages can be generated. The assertions and debugging rules for the Awk program are written in a separate text file. Assertions are useful not only for testing and debugging but can be considered as a mean for program formal specification and documentation. 1 Introduction The execution model of Awk programming language differs from the conventional imperative languages like C. According to [1] the behavior of Awk program can be described as follows. An Awk program is a sequence of patterns and actions that describe what to c..