Some Design Issues in the Visualization of Constraint Logic Program Execution

Visualization of program executions has been found useful in applications which include education and debugging. However, traditional visualization techniques often fall short of expectations or are altogether inadequate for new programming paradigms, such as Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), whose declarative and operational semantics differ in some crucial ways from those of other paradigms. In particular, traditional ideas regarding flow control and the behavior of data often cannot be lifted in a straightforward way to (C)LP from other families of programming languages. In this paper we discuss techniques for visualizing program execution and data evolution in CLP. We briefly review some previously proposed visualization paradigms, and also propose a number of (to our knowledge) novel ones. The graphical representations have been chosen based on the perceived needs of a programmer trying to analyze the behavior and characteristics of an execution. In particular, we concentrate o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: AGP
• Authors: Manuel Carro, Manuel V. Hermenegildo
• Keywords: AGP 1998, Artificial Intelligence, Constraint Logic Programming, Program Execution, Traditional Visualization Techniques