A Declarative Debugger for Sequential Erlang Programs

Declarative debuggers are semi-automatic debugging tools that abstract the execution details to focus on the program semantics. Erroneous computations are represented by suitable trees, which are traversed by asking questions to the user until a bug is found. This paper applies declarative debugging to the sequential subset of the language Erlang. The debugger takes the intermediate representation generated by Erlang systems, known as Core Erlang, and an initial error detected by the user, and locates an erroneous program function responsible for the error. In order to represent the erroneous computation, a semantic calculus for sequential Core Erlang programs is proposed. The debugger uses an abbreviation of the proof trees of this calculus as debugging trees, which allows us to prove the soundness of the approach. The technique has been implemented in a debugger tool publicly available.

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