Related papers: Causes and Effects in Computer Programs

There are countless reasons cited in scientific studies to explain the difficulties in programming learning. The reasons range from the subject's complexity, the ineffective teaching and study methods, to psychological aspects such as…

As developers debug, developers formulate hypotheses about the cause of the defect and gather evidence to test these hypotheses. To better understand the role of hypotheses in debugging, we conducted two studies. In a preliminary study, we…

By recording every state change in the run of a program, it is possible to present the programmer every bit of information that might be desired. Essentially, it becomes possible to debug the program by going ``backwards in time,'' vastly…

As most parallel and distributed programs are internally non-deterministic -- consecutive runs with the same input might result in a different program flow -- vanilla cyclic debugging techniques as such are useless. In order to use cyclic…

A decision is an act or event of decision taking. Decision making always includes decision taking, the latter not involving significant exchanges with non-deciding agents. A decision outcome is a piece of storable information constituting…

Concurrent systems identify systems, either software, hardware or even biological systems, that are characterized by sets of independent actions that can be executed in any order or simultaneously. Computer scientists resort to a causal…

Debugging is an essential part of software maintenance and evolution since it allows software developers to analyze program execution step by step. Understanding a program is required to fix potential flaws, alleviate bottlenecks, and…

Modern program verifiers use logic-based encodings of the verification problem that are discharged by a back end reasoning engine. However, instances of such encodings for large programs can quickly overwhelm these back end solvers. Hence,…

Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…

Detecting and understanding reasons for defects and inadvertent behavior in software is challenging due to their increasing complexity. In configurable software systems, the combinatorics that arises from the multitude of features a user…

A general theory of programs, programming and programming languages built up from a few concepts of elementary set theory. Derives, as theorems, properties treated as axioms by classic approaches to programming. Covers sequential and…

Determining and measuring cause-effect relationships is fundamental to most scientific studies of natural phenomena. The notion of causation is distinctly different from correlation which only looks at association of trends or patterns in…

Debugging distributed systems in-production is inevitable and hard. Myriad interactions between concurrent components in modern, complex and large-scale systems cause non-deterministic bugs that offline testing and verification fail to…

Runtime nondeterminism is a fact of life in modern database applications. Previous research has shown that nondeterminism can cause applications to intermittently crash, become unresponsive, or experience data corruption. We propose…

Causal reasoning is a crucial part of science and human intelligence. In order to discover causal relationships from data, we need structure discovery methods. We provide a review of background theory and a survey of methods for structure…

What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…

The origins of proof-theoretic semantics lie in the question of what constitutes the meaning of the logical connectives and its response: the rules of inference that govern the use of the connective. However, what if we go a step further…

Bug finding tools can find defects in software source code us- ing an automated static analysis. This automation may be able to reduce the time spent for other testing and review activities. For this we need to have a clear understanding of…

We define an algorithm to be the set of programs that implement or express that algorithm. The set of all programs is partitioned into equivalence classes. Two programs are equivalent if they are essentially the same program. The set of…

Static analysis is one of the most widely adopted techniques to find software bugs before code is put in production. Designing and implementing effective and efficient static analyses is difficult and requires high expertise, which results…