[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, November 6, 2002
206 Egan  Hall, Northeastern University
    (building 44 on http://www.campusmap.neu.edu/)
1030-1230

Sukyoung Ryu

Harvard University

Title: Debugging Everywhere Project (work in progress)

Abstract:
Even though many current applications run on heterogeneous networks
and are composed of modules written in different programming languages,
debugging technology is not ready to support such applications.
We are developing techniques for building source-level debuggers
for multiple platforms and multiple languages. Since our project
has shown that it is easy to retarget our prototype, ldb, from machine
to machine, we are focusing on supports for multi-language debugging.

Much of a debugger's job is to undo what the compiler has done or to do
what the compiler could do, but at run time. And the set of all operations
performed by debuggers is small. ldb makes the compiler do as much of this
work as possible. Instead of giving the debugger data about the program,
forcing it to figure out how to manipulate the data on the target machine,
the compiler gives the debugger code that it can run to probe the program.
And a variant of the compiler runs at debug time and compiles expressions
into PostScript, which ldb uses to evaluate the expressions. Since this
approach reuses knowledge already in the compiler, it simplifies debugger
and gives much freedom for the compiler writer.


Upcoming presentations:

11/13: Harry Mairson:  From Hilbert Spaces to Dilbert Spaces:  Context
Semantics Made Simple 

1/8/03: Ken Baclawski: Ontology-Based Computing

--Mitch