Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Lisp Programs

Recent advances in web technologies and the availability of robust Lisp libraries supporting them have made it possible to think of new ways of understanding and debugging large applications. In this paper, we will discuss two basic ideas for assessing and verifying the behaviour of Lisp programs. First, we propose to use a web browser for graphically displaying debug output in a similar but more versatile way as the Lisp listener is normally used to print output traces. And second, we propose a method for creating HTML visualisations of complex data and control structures that don't trade in level of detail for readability. We will introduce GTFL (a Graphical Terminal For Lisp), which we have implemented based on these two ideas, and discuss its applications.

Publication year:2009

Keywords:lisp, HTML, GFTL, dynamics, programming languages, debugging