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spock: A Debugging Support Tool for Logic Programs under the Answer-Set Semantics

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5437))

Abstract

Answer-set programming (ASP) is an emerging logic-programming paradigm that strictly separates the description of a problem from its solving methods. Despite its semantic elegance, ASP suffers from a lack of support for program developers. In particular, tools are needed that help engineers in detecting erroneous parts of their programs. Unlike in other areas of logic programming, applying tracing techniques for debugging logic programs under the answer-set semantics seems rather unnatural, since employing imperative solving algorithms would undermine the declarative flavour of ASP. In this paper, we present the system spock, a debugging support tool for answer-set programs making use of ASP itself. The implemented techniques maintain the declarative nature of ASP within the debugging process and are independent of the actual computation of answer sets.

This work was partially supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under project P18019.

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Gebser, M., Pührer, J., Schaub, T., Tompits, H., Woltran, S. (2009). spock: A Debugging Support Tool for Logic Programs under the Answer-Set Semantics. In: Seipel, D., Hanus, M., Wolf, A. (eds) Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management. INAP WLP 2007 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5437. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00675-3_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00675-3_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00674-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00675-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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