whm.arizona%Rand-Relay@sri-unix.UUCP (07/28/83)
Several weeks ago I posted a query for information on debuggers. The information I received fell into two categories: information about papers, and information about actual programs. The information about papers was basically subsumed by two documents: an annotated bibliography, and soon-to-be-published conference proceedings. The information about programs was quite diverse and somewhat lengthy. In order to avoid clogging the digest, only the information about the papers is included here. A longer version of this message will be posted to net.lang on USENET. The basic gold mine of current ideas on debugging is the Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Symposium on High-Level Debugging which was held in March, 1983. Informed sources say that it is scheduled to appear as vol. 8, no. 4 (1983 August) of SIGSOFT's Software Engineering Notes and as vol. 18, no. 8 (1983 August) of SIGPLAN Notices. All members of SIGSOFT and SIGPLAN should receive copies sometime in August. Mark Johnson at HP has put together a pair of documents on debugging. They are: "An Annotated Software Debugging Bibliography" "A Software Debugging Glossary" I believe that a non-annotated version of this bibliography appeared in SIGPLAN in February 1982. The annotated bibliography is the basic gold mine of "pointers" about debugging. Mark can be contacted at: Mark Scott Johnson Hewlett-Packard Laboratories 1501 Page Mill Road, 3U24 Palo Alto, CA 94304 415/857-8719 Arpa: Johnson.HP-Labs@RAND-RELAY USENET: ...!ucbvax!hplabs!johnson Two books were mentioned that are not currently included in Mark's bibliography: "Algorithmic Debugging" by Ehud Shapiro. It has information on source-level debugging, debuggers in the language being debugged, debuggers for unconventional languages, etc. It is supposedly available from MIT Press. (From dixon.pa@parc-maxc) "Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment" A section of the book describes the system's interactive debugger. (This book is supposedly due in bookstores on or around the middle of October. A much earlier version of the debugger was briefly described in the August 1981 BYTE.) (From Pavel@Cornel.) Ken Laws (Laws@sri-iu) sent me an extract from "A Bibliography of Automatic Programming" which contained a number of references on topics such as programmer's apprentices, program understanding, programming by example, etc. Many thanks to those who took the time to reply. Bill Mitchell The University of Arizona whm.arizona@rand-relay arizona!whm