Plan Diagrams as the Basis for Understanding and Debugging Pascal Programs *

This chapter aims to create an intelligent system capable of aiding programmers in the task of debugging programs. Plan recognition and symbolic evaluation are used by the expert to gain an understanding of the program. In order to debug a computer program it is necessary to develop an understanding of the program and to use this understanding to pinpoint the places where what the program actually does differ from what one would expect knowing the purpose of the program. When debugging programs there are essentially two processes used by expert programmers. Work is currently in progress on building an intelligent debugging system (IDS) for Pascal programs. The long term aim of this research is to build a system capable of helping the programmer to locate and fix errors of types 1 to 4 in programs.