The debbuggable interpreter design pattern

peer-reviewedThe use of Interpreter and Visitor design patterns has been widely adopted to implement programming language interpreters due to their expressive and simple design. However, no general approach to conceive a debugger is commonly adopted. This paper presents the debuggable interpreter design pattern as a general approach to extend a language interpreter with debugging facilities such as step-over and step-into. Moreover, it enables multiple debuggers coexisting and extends the Interpreter and Visitor design patterns with a few hooks and a debugging service. SmallJS, an interpreter for Javascript-like language, serves as an illustration