[e-lang] Draft "Causeway: A message-oriented distributed debugger"

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

Toby Murray wrote:
> 2. The work of Alex Groce
> 
> Causeway is focused on helping a programmer understand the "cause" of a
> bug, right? It does so by allowing them to examine the trace of events
> the led to the bug, presenting the information in such a way to allow
> the programmer to more naturally understand what caused the failure.
> This process is "manual" in the sense that the programmer must discern
> for him/herself what the cause is, using the information that causeway
> presents. There has been a bit of work on automating sort of thing,
> namely in the automatic analysis of
> sequences-of-events-leading-to-failures to determine which events
> "caused" the failure in question. A notable example is the PhD thesis of
> Alex Groce, see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce/ . He defines a formal
> definition of causation

Yes, the same counterfactual-based definition by David Lewis that is used
in your work on authority analysis for CSP, I notice.

Since a subject is defined to have authority to perform an action
iff it can cause that action, there is a formalisation of authority
corresponding to any given formalisation of causality. So we should be
able to look for instances of excess authority using the same techniques
that are needed to explain bugs, I think.

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood ⚥