CIDER:

The Curry Integrated Development EnviRonment

(Version of August 9, 2004)


Overview | Download | Documentation

Overview

CIDER is a graphical programming and development environment for the multi-paradigm declarative language Curry. CIDER is intended as a platform to integrate various tools for analyzing and debugging Curry programs. Currently, CIDER consists of CIDER is completely implemented in Curry so that it is fairly easy to extend CIDER by new analysis tools: a new analysis can be integrated by providing a function which takes a program as input and produces a list of analysis results, where each analysis result is a pair consisting of a function name and the associated result for analysing this function. If an analysis is implemented in this way, only one line of code must be added in the implementation of CIDER to provide a graphical interface for this new analysis. Note that Curry's lazy evaluation is quite useful here: although an analysis is defined on an entire program, only those parts are actually analysed that are relevant for showing the currently requested result.

To get an impression of the use of CIDER, here is the main window after starting CIDER and loading a program:

The main window in the middle is an editor window for editing the current program. On the left- and right-hand side, there is a list of the top-level functions in the current file and a list of the currently available analysis tools, respectively. After selecting a function and an analysis in the corresponding list boxes, the function is analyzed and the analysis result is either shown in the bottom window (if it is a textual result) or, if it is a graph, it is visualized with the graph visualization tool daVinci. Currently, CIDER offers the following analysis tools (which are useful but not very complex and mainly included for demonstration issues):

For instance, the analysis Dependency Graph computes the following visualization of the dependency graph for the function qsort in the program shown above:

Finally, CIDER contains also a graphical debugger/tracer to visualize the evaluation of expressions. Currently, the debugger always starts with the evaluation of the expression "main" w.r.t. the currently loaded program, i.e., if one wants to visualize the evaluation of an expression e, one has to add the definition "main = e" to the current program. The debugger always shows the expressions as trees although some parts of the expressions are actually shared. If a shared subexpression is reduced, all shared identical subexpressions are also reduced in the same step in order to be conform with Curry's operational semantics. The subexpression reduced in the next step (the next redex) is always emphasized in red (similarly, a variable is emphasized in red if it will be bound in the next step). One can trace forward and backward through all evaluation steps. Furthermore, one can also set a breakpoint to skip larger parts of a computation. However, the evaluator used by the debugger is not very fast since it is based on a meta-evaluator for Curry programs implemented in Curry. A snapshot of the debugger is shown in the following picture:

Implementation

The implementation of CIDER is freely available. The implementation consists of a collection of Curry modules which are available as a gzipped tar file (see the README file in the distribution for installation instructions).

Requirements for installing CIDER: Since CIDER is implemented in Curry, it requires an installed Curry system. The implementation uses various system libraries (for distributed programming, GUI programming, etc) which are available in the PAKCS distribution. Thus, you should have PAKCS (Version 1.6) installed in order to compile CIDER. Since the implementation is mainly based on the Tk library of PAKCS, you need also a Tcl/Tk implementation (including the windowing shell wish) which can be downloaded here. If you want to use the graph visualization tool, you need also an installed daVinci system which can be downloaded here.

Documentation

Currently, there is no user manual for CIDER (we hope that its use is self-explaining) but there are a few papers where you can find more details about CIDER and its implementation.
Short overview of CIDER
This short description of a system demonstration of CIDER provides an introduction into the main functionality of CIDER.
An Integrated Development Environment for Declarative Multi-Paradigm Programming
This paper describes the functionality of CIDER and the main ideas behind the implementation of CIDER. It also contains a short description how to extend the functionality of CIDER (e.g., adding new program analyses).
Diploma thesis (in German)
This is a diploma thesis on CIDER, written by Johannes Koj (the main implementor of CIDER). This thesis contains details about the design and implementation of CIDER.


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Michael Hanus