Master Thesis Defense by Mr Peter Skocovsky
Mr Peter Skocovsky defended his master thesis on 'Realisation of Stepping for Real-World ASP Languages'
Mr Peter Skocovsky defended his master thesis on 'Realisation of Stepping for Real-World ASP Languages' on 11 April 2014 at UNL.
Abstract:
Stepping is folklore in debugging of procedural programming languages that allows developers to focus their attention to each statement of their program one after the other. Recent results in the field of answer-set programming (ASP) debugging brought forth a formalism for stepping through answer-set programs. The main idea is to monotonically build up an interpretation by, at each step, adding literals derived by a rule that is active under the partial interpretation obtained in the previous step. As the stepping framework was, so far, introduced only for theoretical ASP languages, in this thesis, we lift it to input languages of state-of-the-art ASP solvers. For these purposes, we specify translation of programs of these languages into so-called abstract-constraint programs, to which we then apply Stepping. We also prove that stepping through a resulting abstract-constraint program is sound and complete. Further, we formally describe the input language of the grounder Gringo in order to specify such a translation and we indicate that this description and translation can be simply adapted for the solver DLV. The resulting version of the stepping framework was implemented as the primary debugging mechanism of the integrated development environment SeaLion.