Visualization of Well Engineered Logic Specification Programs

Abstract

Prolog is one of the most popular languages in logic programming. However, when programmers deal with the task of developing large systems, a well-designed programming environment is necessary. The specification processing environment with Controls (SPEC) project was earlier developed by the author. However, it is still lacking supporting tools for the analysis and design of logic programs. In this paper, we propose a visualization environment (VSPEC) that facilitates a hyper-text like navigation of large logic specification programs. In addition to the hyper-text exitor, a declarative specification browser utilizing an "and-or” tree showing the semantics of the specification program is also addressed. The visualization tool is integrated with a simplified version of SPEC running on the MS windows. The revised SPEC language is addressed, followed by a discussion of the program transformation algorithm that generates Prolog programs from their specifications. A number of language constructs are also discussed.