Some time ago I stumbled upon Shapiro’s work on metainterpreters for debugging (they were mentioned in the Art of Prolog) and, having fallen in love with the concept, started skimming his thesis and whichever article I could find related to “prolog meta interpreter debugging”). The problem now i…

Is this not what you seek? trace/0 or gtrace/0

@EricGT not at all: I often find traces too verbose and too low level, and the user still has to analyze that manually. Some improvements are possible on that, I saw @DouglasRMiles doing that in some packages, and I myself tried with https://github.com/meditans/gestalt Here I’m mainly talking about…

I vaguely remember trying Shapiro’s code a long time ago. The papers looked good – but the code was clearly “research quality” and would have needed a lot of work to become useable. I suspect that a combination of trace/2 and wrap_predicate/4 would work better for large programs.

[image] meditans: the gist of it is defining a meta-interpreter that, for example, can evaluate your code to a certain depth and identify what’s looping in case of non-termination, or use the user as an oracle to debug why a solution is not showing up. For me, there are many nice tools alread…

Why isn't the community using meta-interpreter for debugging more?

General

EricGT September 11, 2020, 6:24pm 5

For me, there are many nice tools already in the toolbox.

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Why isn't the community using meta-interpreter for debugging more?

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