Structured Planning and Debugging

Abstract

The SPADE theory uses linguistic formalisms to model the program planning and debugging processes. The theory begins with a taxonomy of basic planning concepts covering strategies for identification, decomposition and reformulation. A handle is provided for recognizing interactions between goals and deriving a lincnr solution. A complementary taxonomy of rational bugs and associated repair techniques is also provided. SPA OK. introduces a new data structure to facilitate debugging -- the derivation tree of the program. SPADE generalizes recent work in Artificial Intelligence by Suasman and Sacerdoti on automatic programming, and extends The theory of program design developed by the Structured Programming movement. It provides a more structured information processing model of human problem solving than the production systems of Newell and Simon, and articulates the type of problem solving curriculum advocated by Papert's Logo Project.