Proving the correctness of algorithmic debugging for functional programs

This paper presents a formal model of tracing for functional programs based on a small-step operational semantics. The model records the computation of a functional program in a graph which can be utilised for various purposes such as algorithmic debugging. The main contribution of this paper is to prove the correctness of algorithmic debugging for functional programs based on the model. Although algorithmic debugging for functional programs is implemented in several tracers such as Hat, the correctness has not been formally proved before. The difficulty of the proof is to find a suitable induction principle and a sufficiently general induction hypothesis.