[Hat] Visualising Program Traces With Hat

[nlavine at haverford.edu ()]

Hello,

I am writing to let you know that I am working on a project to use Hat
ARTs to trace programs written in a pure functional subset of Python. The
goal is to let students in the introductory computer science classes at my
school (Haverford College) generate traces of their programs to help with
debugging and, hopefully, understanding what the programs do. This
introductory course uses Python first with a functional style and then
with an imperative style, and debugging/visualization tools are sadly
lacking in the first half. My plan is to first write a program to
transform a subset of Python for tracing, as hat-trans does, and then
perhaps work on new GUI tools for viewing traces and perhaps add Eclipse
integration, since the classes here use Eclipse.

Thanks to all of you who have done work on Hat and made it available to
us. I would appreciate any ideas or suggestions you might have, or any
information you have on other projects like this. If you're interested, I
will hopefully have some GUI trace-viewing tools to contribute to Hat in a
few months.

Noah Lavine

[Olaf Chitil]

Hello Noah,

it is great to hear that Hat inspired you to transfer it to Python. I'm
not familiar with Python, but it differs from Haskell in several ways
which you will have to take into account. Haskell has a simple graph
rewriting semantics and uses algebraic data types. The first is
essential for the definition of the Hat trace structure, the second
substantially influences the trace structure and the program
transformation. So you have to see whether the Hat trace structure fits
Python. Our program transformation also uses the fact that Haskell is a
non-strict language. It may be easier to first build a system for a tiny
subset of Python that is inspired by Hat but doesn't actually use it.

Ciao,
Olaf

Post by nlavine at haverford.edu ()
Hello,
I am writing to let you know that I am working on a project to use Hat
ARTs to trace programs written in a pure functional subset of Python. The
goal is to let students in the introductory computer science classes at my
school (Haverford College) generate traces of their programs to help with
debugging and, hopefully, understanding what the programs do. This
introductory course uses Python first with a functional style and then
with an imperative style, and debugging/visualization tools are sadly
lacking in the first half. My plan is to first write a program to
transform a subset of Python for tracing, as hat-trans does, and then
perhaps work on new GUI tools for viewing traces and perhaps add Eclipse
integration, since the classes here use Eclipse.
Thanks to all of you who have done work on Hat and made it available to
us. I would appreciate any ideas or suggestions you might have, or any
information you have on other projects like this. If you're interested, I
will hopefully have some GUI trace-viewing tools to contribute to Hat in a
few months.
Noah Lavine
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