A study on assisting in prolog program comprehension using stepwise refinement and stepwise comparison

摘要

Reading a program, learners must understand syntax, semantics and usage, which are characteristic of each individual language. Moreover, they must acquire typical writing art through understanding various good programs. In order to obtain good programming methods, learners must also know the execution flow of programs, which is difficult to be explained statically. In this paper, as a learning environment for prolog programs, an animation tree is proposed, which allows learners manipulate program execution forth and back interactively in stepwise. The effect of the animation tree in the problem solving process and the contents of finding through comparison of two programs with the same structure are investigated.