The development of an incremental debugging system : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

Debugging is a major area of software development that has received little attention. This thesis starts by looking at work done in the area of bug prevention, bug detection, bug location and bug correction. A debugging system, BIAS, is proposed to help in detecting, locating and correcting bugs. Three major design goals are established. Firstly, the system should be simple and easy to understand as this will encourage use. Secondly, the system should be general so that it will be available to a large number of users. Finally, it should be incremental as this will save users' time. An incremental language, STILL, is designed to show how BIAS applies to structured languages. The construction of the system is shown. Each data structure, and how it is used, is described. BIAS uses an interpretive system and runs threaded code on a pseudo-machine. How the threads are interpreted and how they are set up is shown next. The use of BIAS is shown by following through an example session with the system. This consists of entering a program, editing it, and running it. As bugs show themselves, various debugging commands are used to locate the bugs. The program is then edited, and the corrections linked into the code so that it will run correctly. This cycle is repeated until no bugs remain, without at any time recompiling the whole program. It turns out that the best way of achieving the design goals is to extend an incremental compiler host to include debugging commands. This gives a clear emphasis to the power of incremental compilers

Implications of Structured Programming for Machine Architecture

Based on an empirical study of more than 10,000 lines of program text written in a GOTO-less language, a machine architecture specifically designed for structured programs is proposed. Since assignment, CALL, RETURN, and IF statements together account for 93 percent of all executable statements, special care is given to ensure that these statements can be implemented efficiently. A highly compact instruction encoding scheme is presented, which can reduce program size by a factor of 3. Unlike a Huffman code, which utilizes variable length fields, this method uses only fixed length (1-byte) opcode and address fields. The most frequent instructions consist of a single 1-byte field. As a consequence, instruction decoding time is minimized, and the machine is efficient with respect to both space and time. © 1978, ACM. All rights reserved

Automated Engineering Design (AED); An approach to automated documentation

The automated engineering design (AED) is reviewed, consisting of a high level systems programming language, a series of modular precoded subroutines, and a set of powerful software machine tools that effectively automate the production and design of new languages. AED is used primarily for development of problem and user-oriented languages. Software production phases are diagramed, and factors which inhibit effective documentation are evaluated

Approaches to the determination of parallelism in computer programs

Approaches to the determination of parallelism in computer program

Development of an MSC language and compiler, volume 1

Higher order programming language and compiler for advanced computer software system to be used with manned space flights between 1972 and 198