Visualization of Constraint Handling Rules: Semantics and Applications
This work addresses the problem of program comprehension and debugging for users of Constraint Handling Rules, though it appears incremental as it extends existing CHR with visualization features.
The paper introduces CHRvis, an animation extension for Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) that embeds visualization features to animate program executions, aiming to help programmers understand and debug CHR programs by providing operational semantics and discussing correctness.
The work in the paper presents an animation extension ($CHR^{vis}$) to Constraint Handling Rules (CHR). Visualizations have always helped programmers understand data and debug programs. A picture is worth a thousand words. It can help identify where a problem is or show how something works. It can even illustrate a relation that was not clear otherwise. $CHR^{vis}$ aims at embedding animation and visualization features into CHR programs. It thus enables users, while executing programs, to have such executions animated. The paper aims at providing the operational semantics for $CHR^{vis}$. The correctness of $CHR^{vis}$ programs is also discussed. Some applications of the new extension are also introduced.