Declarative debugging with Buddha

Abstract

Haskell is a very safe language, particularly because of its type system. However there will always be programs that do the wrong thing. Programmer fallibility, partial or incorrect specifications and typographic errors are but a few of the reasons that make bugs a fact of life. This paper is about the use and implementation of a debugger, called Buddha, which helps Haskell programmers understand why their programs misbehave. Traditional debugging tools that examine the program execution step-by-step are not suitable for Haskell because of its unorthodox evaluation strategy. Instead, a different approach is taken which abstracts away the evaluation order of the program and focuses on its hig..