Acid: A Debugger Built From A Language
Phil Winterbottom · 1994
Acid is an unusual source-level symbolic debugger for Plan 9. It is implemented as a lan-guage interpreter with specialized primitives that provide debugger support. Programs written in the language manipulate one or more target processes; variables in the lan-guage represent the symbols, state, and resources of those processes. This structure allows complex interaction between the debugger and the target program and provides a conve-nient method of parameterizing differences between machine architectures. Although some effort is required to learn the debugging language, the richness and flexibility of the debugging environment encourages new ways of reasoning about the way programs run and the conditions under which they fail. 1.