[Hat] Visualising Program Traces With Hat

[nlavine at haverford.edu]

Hello,

I am writing to let you know that I am working on a project to use Hat
ARTs to trace programs written in a pure functional subset of Python. The
goal is to let students in the introductory computer science classes at my
school (Haverford College) generate traces of their programs to help with
debugging and, hopefully, understanding what the programs do. This
introductory course uses Python first with a functional style and then
with an imperative style, and debugging/visualization tools are sadly
lacking in the first half. My plan is to first write a program to
transform a subset of Python for tracing, as hat-trans does, and then
perhaps work on new GUI tools for viewing traces and perhaps add Eclipse
integration, since the classes here use Eclipse.

Thanks to all of you who have done work on Hat and made it available to
us. I would appreciate any ideas or suggestions you might have, or any
information you have on other projects like this. If you're interested, I
will hopefully have some GUI trace-viewing tools to contribute to Hat in a
few months.

Noah Lavine