Semantic issues in the design of languages for debugging

Richard H. Crawford, Ronald A. Olsson, W.Wilson Ho, Christopher E. Wee
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Abstract

The design of debugging tools is often ad hoc, with tools tailor-made for specific target languages and operating systems. Consequently, no unified theory of debugger design has emerged. Especially neglected is the design of languages to control debugging activities—and fundamental issues that arise in the implementation and use of such languages. We introduce GDL, a powerful low-level debugging language whose primitives capture the intuitive, informal semantics used in imperative debugging. GDL can be extended to incorporate higher-level constructs, hence we use it as our vehicle to examine central semantic issues that confront designers and implementors of debugging languages.

We gauge the efficiency of various GDL constructs on typical architectures and highlight semantic issues arising from the integration of those mechanisms. Our exploration of semantic issues is intended to provide guidance for designers of debugging languages, to ensure all high-level language features can be mapped cleanly and efficiently onto underlying architectural hooks, without endangering the semantic integrity of those high-level constructs.

调试语言设计中的语义问题
调试工具的设计通常是特别的,使用为特定的目标语言和操作系统量身定制的工具。因此,没有统一的调试器设计理论出现。特别被忽视的是控制调试活动的语言设计,以及在实现和使用这些语言时出现的基本问题。我们介绍GDL,这是一种功能强大的低级调试语言,其原语捕获了命令式调试中使用的直观、非正式语义。GDL可以扩展到包含更高级的结构,因此我们使用它作为工具来检查调试语言的设计者和实现者所面临的中心语义问题。我们衡量了典型架构上各种GDL构造的效率,并强调了这些机制集成所产生的语义问题。我们对语义问题的探索旨在为调试语言的设计人员提供指导,以确保所有高级语言特性都可以清晰有效地映射到底层架构挂钩上,而不会危及这些高级结构的语义完整性。
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