Debugging a high level language via a unified interpreter and compiler runtime environment
Jian Xian Cai, Marc Moreno Maza, Shantu Watt, Marie Dunstan · 2004
ABSTRACT Aldor is a programming language that provides higher-order facilities for symbolic mathematical computation. Aldor has an optimizing compiler and an interpreter. The interpreter is slow, but provides a useful debugging environment. Compiled Aldor code is efficient, but cannot be debugged using user-level concepts. By unifying the runtime environments of the Aldor interpreter and compiled Aldor executables, we have realized a debugger for Aldor. This integration of the various existing functionalities in its debugger improves the development environment of Aldor in a significant manner, and provides the first such environment for symbolic mathematical computation. We propose that this approach can be useful for other very high level programming languages.