The Design of a High-level, Language-Independent Symbolic Debugging System

The design of a language-independent, interactive system to facilitate the analysis and symbolic debugging of computer programs written in high-level languages is presented. The principal features of the system are: (1) host source language independence is supported by the abstraction of language entities and constructs with a language interfacer providing the system with language-dependent details, (2) translators can cooperate with the system at varying levels of detail, (3) the user interacts with the system and an executing object program thru an extendable debugging language, and (4) debugging primitive actions are kept to a minimum and nonprimitive actions are provided by user-supplied and library debugging procedures. The design criteria of such a system are presented, and a realization of such a system is illustrated by examples of debugging commands and procedures encoded in a debugging language.