An Automated Debugger for Mercury - Opium-M 0.1 User and Reference Manuals

This document gathers the user manual and the reference manual of Opium-M, an analyser of execution traces of Mercury Programs. Opium-M is an adaptation to Mercury of Opium a trace analyser for Prolog. 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. Opium-M 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. Opium-M, then, automatically filters out information irrelevant for the users