[mercury-users] [petdr at miscrit.be: Report on the ICFP 2000 prog contest]

[schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU]

On  6 Sep, Mark Anthony BROWN wrote:

>> > We didn't use the declarative debugger
>> 
>> Out of curiosity, why not?
> 
> I'm not completely sure, since I wasn't there at the time.  But I think
> we weren't generally using mdb due to a seg fault in mdb which we
> were too busy to investigate at the time.
> 
> In any case, I would have recommended that it not yet be used for a
> critical project with less than 72 hours until the deadline.  The main
> reason for this is that it has not been extensively tested (nowhere near
> as much as mdb, anyway).

Fair enough.  You can't expect software still in development to be rock
solid all the time.

> Having said that, I agree that a declarative debugger would be very
> useful to diagnose the sort of bugs that can get past the determinism
> system, such as incorrect failures in semidet code, and incorrect
> exceptions in any sort of code.

... and of course the good, old-fashioned wrong answer errors.

> Of the "real
> world" bugs I have diagnosed with the debugger (mainly in the debugger
> itself)

You're debugging the debugger with itself?  That's luxurious to the
point of decadence!  You should see what I was doing to debug the
Quintus debugger!

> The ray tracer bug will make a good case study of the declarative
> debugger.  I'll let this list know how it goes, once I get mdb to work
> properly.

I'll be interested to hear how quickly (how many questions) the
declarative debugger finds that needle in the haystack.

-- 
Peter Schachte                     The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its
mailto:schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        teaching should, therefore, be regarded
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/  as a criminal offense.
PGP: finger schachte at 128.250.37.3      -- E. W. Dijkstra 

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