Proceedings of the symposium on High-level debugging

It has been my pleasure to serve as General Chairman of the ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Software Engineering Symposium on High-Level Debugging, which was held at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, on March 21-23, 1983. The symposium was one in a continuing series of Software Engineering Symposia sponsored by ACM.The symposium was limited to approximately 90 attendees; roughly twice that number indicated an interest in attending. Attendees were chosen on the basis of position statements submitted to the program committee. The attendees came from Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and all regions of the United States.Publication of these proceedings substantially increases the literature in debugging. To my knowledge, this is the first symposium on debugging since the Courant Symposium in 1970. Many new issues and many new approaches to old issues are reported here.These proceedings contain session summaries and papers submitted by the participants. They constitute the formal record of the symposium. The informal discussion, the live and videotaped demonstrations of debugging tools, and the spirit of collegiality among the participants were important aspects of the symposium that are not recorded here.The Program Committee met on November 8, 1982, to organize the Symposium and to select participants. One hundred twenty submissions (representing one hundred sixty people) were received, numbering over eleven hundred pages of material. To maintain the workshop character of the symposium, only half of these could be accommodated.The submissions fell into three groups: position statements (60%), working papers (30%), and research abstracts (10%). The proceedings contains the revised papers and abstracts of all invited participants; the position statements are not included. Versions of several of the papers have been submitted for publication in referred journals.The Symposium was organized into seven sessions based on the submissions: Debugging Methodology, Knowledge-Based Debugging, Requirements/Design Debugging, Integrated Environments, Distributed Debugging, Implementation Issues, and Demonstrations. The proceedings are likewise divided into these seven categories; each begins with a summary of the session as i t unfolded at Asilomar, followed by the papers and abstracts that most relate to the session. It should be noted, however, that few papers were formally presented at the Symposium. Most sessions were organized as panels, short papers, or directed group discussions.