Towards Assertion-based Debugging of Higher-Order (C)LP Programs

Higher-order constructs extend the expressiveness of first-order (Constraint) Logic Programming (©LP) both syntactically and semantically. At the same time assertions have been in use for some time in ©LP systems helping programmers detect errors and validate programs. However, these assertion-based extensions to ©LP have not been integrated well with higher order to date. Our work contributes to filling this gap by extending the assertion-based approach to error detection and program validation to the higher-order context, within ©LP. It is based on an extension of properties and assertions as used in ©LP in order to be able to fully describe arguments that are predicates.