A debugging model for functional logic programs

This paper presents a box-oriented debugging model for the functional logic language ALF. Due to the sophisticated operational semantics of ALF which is based on innermost basic narrowing with simplification, the debugger must reflect the application of the different computation rules during program execution. Hence our debugging model includes not only one box type as in Byrd's debugging model for logic programs but several different kinds of boxes corresponding to the various computation rules of the functional logic language (narrowing, simplification etc.). Moreover, additional box types are introduced in order to allow skips over (sometimes) uninteresting program parts like proofs of the condition in a conditional equation. Since ALF is a genuine amalgamation of functional and logic languages, our debugging model subsumes operational aspects of both kinds of languages. As a consequence, it can be also used for pure logic languages, pure functional languages with eager evaluation, or functional logic languages with a less sophisticated operational semantics like SLOG or eager BABEL

Programming with Undo

This thesis is about objects that can undo their state changes. Based on an earlier work on data structure persistence, we propose generating undo methods for classes from annotated classes automatically. As opposed to ephemeral data structures, persistent data structures carry their older versions, and undo for a persistent structure is just returning to a previous version. Undoable objects simplify programming in a number of areas such as backtracking in constraint programming, and undo for interactive applications. Using the undo methods of individual objects, larger application level undo functionality can be built in an easier way