A visual notation for succinct program traces

IF 1.7 3区计算机科学 Q3 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Journal of Computer Languages Pub Date : 2023-06-01 DOI:10.1016/j.cola.2023.101199

Divya Bajaj , Martin Erwig , Danila Fedorin

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Abstract

Program traces are a widely used representation for explaining the dynamic behavior of programs. They help to make sense of computations and also support the location and elimination of bugs. Unfortunately, program traces can grow quite big very quickly, even for small programs, which compromises their usefulness.

In this paper we present a visual notation for program traces that supports their concise representation. We explain the design decisions of the notation and compare it in detail with several alternatives. An important part of the trace representation is its flexibility and adaptability, which allows users to transform traces by applying filters that capture common abstractions for trace representations.

We also present an evaluation of the trace notation and filters on a set of standard examples. The results show that our representation can reduce the overall size of traces by at least 79%, which suggests that our notation is an effective improvement over the use of plain traces in the explanation of dynamic program behavior.

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简洁程序跟踪的可视化表示法

程序跟踪是一种广泛使用的表示方法，用于解释程序的动态行为。它们有助于理解计算，也支持定位和消除错误。不幸的是，即使对于小程序来说，程序跟踪也会很快变得很大，这会损害它们的有用性。在本文中，我们为程序跟踪提供了一种可视化的表示法，它支持它们的简洁表示。我们解释了符号的设计决策，并将其与几种替代方案进行了详细比较。跟踪表示的一个重要部分是它的灵活性和适应性，它允许用户通过应用过滤器来转换跟踪，这些过滤器捕获跟踪表示的常见抽象。我们还对一组标准示例的跟踪表示法和过滤器进行了评估。结果表明，我们的表示可以将跟踪的总体大小减少至少79%，这表明在解释动态程序行为时，我们的记法是对使用普通跟踪的有效改进。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Computer Languages Computer Science-Computer Networks and Communications

CiteScore

5.00

自引率

13.60%

发文量