Abstract

Despite these expected benefits, declarative debugging is not yet widely used in practice to find real bugs. There are three main reasons for this: 1. Most previous declarative debuggers only support a subset of the features of their target language that is not sufficient to express real programs. 2. Previous declarative debuggers do not scale well when applied to problems with large search spaces. 3. Previous declarative debuggers do not do enough to make the questions easier for the user to answer. The declarative nature of Mercury makes it relatively easy to implement a declarative debugger that can handle the full language. The version of the Mercury declarative debugger that was the starting point for this thesis already handled almost all of Mercury. By extending it to handle exceptions we made it handle the full language

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