URL: xxxxxx First Published Online [April 2014] 1 Towards Assertion-based Debugging of Higher-Order (C)LP Programs

Higher-order programming adds flexibility to the software development process. Within the (Constraint) Logic Programming ((C)LP) paradigm, Prolog has included higher-order constructs since the early days, and there have been many other proposals for combining the first-order kernel of (C)LP with different higher-order constructs. Many of these proposals are currently in use in different (C)LP systems and have been found very useful in programming practice, inheriting the well-known benefits of code reuse (templates), elegance, clarity, and modularization. A number of extensions have also been proposed for (C)LP in order to enhance the process of error detection and program validation. In addition to the use of classical strong typing, a number of other approaches have been proposed which are based on the dynamic and/or static checking of user-provided, optional assertions. Of these, the model of (Hermenegildo et al. 2005) has perhaps had the most impact in practice and different aspects of this model have been incorporated in a number of widely-used (C)LP systems, such as Ciao, SWI, and XSB. A similar evolution is represented by the soft/gradual typing-based approaches in functional programming and the contracts-based extension