Thesis Defense - Kadhim

Compiler generation systems have contributed significantly to our ability to quickly and reliably develop translators for languages that include small domain-specific languages, preprocessor extensions to existing languages, and full blown compilers. With these new translators and languages comes a need for programming support tools, such as debuggers. This research describes and demonstrates a framework for generating debuggers quickly and reliably from specifications. This includes the ability to modify translators in support of debugging. The framework consists of a number of adaptations and additions to a compiler generation system to support the construction of debuggers. This research shows that using the same set of tools when generating debuggers and translators allows significant reuse of specifications.