Simplifying Questions in Maude Declarative Debugger by Transforming Proof Trees?

Abstract. Declarative debugging is a debugging technique that abstracts the exe-cution details that in general may be difficult to follow in declarative languages to focus on results. It relies on a data structure representing the wrong computation, the debugging tree, which is traversed by asking questions to the user about the correctness of the computation steps related to each node. Thus, the complexity of the questions is an important factor regarding the applicability of the technique. In this paper we present a transformation for debugging trees for Maude specifi-cations that ensures that any subterm occurring in a question has been previously replaced by the most reduced form that it has taken during the computation, thus ensuring that questions become as simple as possible