This work discusses some issues in the debugging of concurrent programs. A set of desirable characteristics of a debugger for concurrent languages is deduced from an examination of the differences between the debugging of concurrent programs and that of sequential ones. A debugger for a concurrent language, derived from CSP, is then presented. It is based upon a semantic model of the supported language. The debugger enables to compare a description of the program behaviour to the actual behaviour as well as to valuate assertions on the process state. The description of the behaviuor is given by a formalism whose semantics is also specified. The formalism can specify program behaviuors at various abstraction levels. Lastly some guidelines for the implementation of the debugger are shown and a detailed example of program description is analyzed.
['Fabrizio Baiardi', 'N. De Francesco', 'Enrico Matteoli', 'S. Stefanini', 'Gigliola Vaglini']
Development of a debugger for a concurrent language