In: SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 25, No. 3; Proceedings of the Second ACM Sigplan Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, 1990, Seattle, WA, USA, pages 11-20. March 1990.
Abstract: The authors propose a debugging language, Data Path Expressions (DPEs), for modeling the behavior of parallel programs. The debugging paradigm is for the programmer to describe the expected program behavior and for the debugger to compare the actual program behavior during execution to detect program errors. The authors classify DPEs into five subclasses according to syntactic criteria, and characterize their semantics in terms of a hierarchy of extended Petri Net models. The authors briefly describe the application of DPEs to race conditions, deadlock and starvation.
Keywords: parallel debugging; data path expression; extended net; deadlock; starvation; race condition.