SEMANTIC ISSUES IN THE DESIGN OF LANGUAGES FOR DEBUGGING

The design of debugging tools is often ad hoc, with tools tailor-made for specific target languages and operating systems. Consequently, no unified theory of debugger design has emerged. Especially neglected is the design of languages to control debugging activities-and fundament al issues that arise in the implementation and use of such languages. We introduce GDL, a powerful low-level debugging language whose primit ives capture the intuitive, informal semantics used in imperative debu gging. GDL can be extended to incorporate higher-level constructs, hen ce we use it as our vehicle to examine central semantic issues that co nfront designers and implementers of debugging languages. We gauge the efficiency of various GDL constructs on typical architectures and hig hlight semantic issues arising from the integration of those mechanism s. Our exploration of semantic issues is intended to provide guidance for designers of debugging languages, to ensure all high-level languag e features can be mapped cleanly and efficiently onto underlying archi tectural hooks, without endangering the semantic integrity of those hi gh-level constructs.