Morphine - A Trace Analysis System for Mercury
The Morphine implementation has been Sponsored by ARGo, Esprit Industrial RTD
Project No 25503.
Introduction
Mercury is a
new logic programming language. Its type, mode and determinism
declarations enable codes to be generated that is at the same time
more efficient and more reliable than with current logic programming
languages. The deterministic parts of Mercury programs are as
efficient as their C counterparts. Moreover, numerous mistakes are
detected at compilation time. However, our industrial partner
experience shows that the fewer remaining mistakes, the harder they
are to be diagnosed. A high-level debugging tool was thus necessary.
Program execution traces given by traditional debuggers
provide programmers with useful pieces of information. However, using
them requires to analyse by hand huge amounts of information.
Morphine is connected to the traditional tracer of Mercury, it allows
execution trace analyses to be automated. It provides a relational
trace query language based on Prolog which enables users to specify
precisely what they want to see in the trace. Morphine, then,
automatically filters out information irrelevant for the users.
Morphine provides users a language to write their own debugging
primitives (Prolog plus an handful of primitives connected to the
Mercury trace system) and their own monitors (see the
`foldt' command).
Why is it called Morphine?
Morphine is an adaptation to Mercury of Opium, an extensible debugger
for Prolog. For that reason, Morphine was originally called
Opium-M. As we could not keep that name for copyright reasons, we
renamed it Morphine (Although sed has been a very useful tool in this
respect, it might happen that some occurrences of Opium-M remains
from times to times...). In a sense, Morphine is an Opium derivative.
Documentation
o A little Morphine tutorial
o "Morphine 0.2 User and Reference Manuals". (E. Jahier, M. Ducassé)
PI IRISA N°1234 and RT-INRIA N°0231, IRISA, Rennes, March 1999.
The best thing to have an up-to-date documentation is to use the
man/1 and the apropos/1 commands at the Morphine prompt. An
up-to-date postscript version of the manual can be generated by the
command latex_manual
Installation
To install Morphine:
o If you have not checked out the extras/morphine package of the mercury
distribution or if you want the latest snapshot of Morphine:
- Download the extras package (extras.tgz) on the
Mercury web site .
- De-tar and unzip it (tar xvfz extras.tgz).
Morphine files are in the extras/morphine directory.
o cd extras/morphine/
o Run the script `INSTALL-MORPHINE' (which creates the
`morphine' script in the `extras/morphine/scripts/' directory).
o Add directories `morphine/scripts/' and `morphine/bin/' in your
`PATH' environment variable. Make sure that the executables
`mmc' and `eclipse' are also accessible from your
`PATH'.
The current release of Morphine has been tested with the following
configurations:
o Architectures: sparc/Solaris2.[5,6,7] and
i686/Linux kernel 2.0
o ECLiPSe 4.1 (1). It
should work with later releases. Please let me know if it is not the
case.
o
Mercury: 0.9 .
(1) make sure that the package eclipse_misc.tgz has been downloaded
(i.e., make sure there exists a directory named `lib_pd' in
the ECLiPSe installation directory); Morphine needs it.
Please send comments about Morphine or about this page to:
jahier@imag.fr, ducasse@irisa.fr
Erwan Jahier
Mireille Ducassé