1999•ACM SIGPLAN NoticesOpen access

Reverse execution of programs

Bitan Biswas, Raghvendra Mall

Abstract

Conventional debuggers do not allow users to go back and examine the program states at statements which have already been executed. In case the user wants to examine the program state at a statement which was executed sometime back, he is forced to restart the entire debugging process. To overcome this problem, we examine the issue of reverse execution of programs. To this end, we introduce the concept of inverse of a statement . We describe our implementation of a debugger which can execute C programs in either forward or backward direction depending upon an option set by the user. Our approach is easily extendible to other programming languages.

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Key concepts: Computer science, Debugger, Debugging, Programming language, Statement (logic), Process (computing), Set (abstract data type), State (computer science)