The CLIP Group at DIA / DLSIIS / FIM / Technical University of Madrid (UPM)

• Duration: Dec. 1999 - Dec. 2002
  
• Summary: Developing correct and efficient software for complex applications remains a difficult and costly task. The project objective is an interactive software development environment which allows detecting automatically correctness errors and inefficiencies in programs, during both initial development and maintenance. Such errors and inefficiencies are detected by comparison with (optionally partial) specifications, which are expressed in a flexible assertion language. Any discrepancies should be detected preferably at compile-time, but detection at run-time (testing) should also be supported. The most novel aspect is the use of advanced global program analysis techniques, based on abstract interpretation and safe approximations. This allows handling much richer set of program properties than the type systems used traditionally in compile-time error detection, such as determinacy, non-failure, upper- and lower-bounds on execution cost and data sizes, modes, data structure independence, safety in data access patterns, etc. The techniques used allow inferring such properties safely and comparing them with the specifications. Such specifications also allow automatic program documentation. The system must allow independent development and debugging of modules, thus facilitating the scalability of the approach. The environment will be integrated with a practical constraint programming system which will combine the debugging capabilities developed with other aspects of program development such as automatic specialization and parallelization.
• Keywords: Program Debugging, Maintenance, Documentation, Assertions, Abstract Interpretation, Global Analysis, Specialization, Parallelization, Visualization, Logic and Constraint Programming.
• Research Personnel Involved: M. Hermenegildo, F. Bueno, P. López, G. Puebla, M. Carro.