[m-rev.] for review: cliques on the stack and the debugger

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On 26-Apr-2012, Peter Wang <novalazy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Later, it would be nice to display cliques less obtrusively, e.g.
> 
>    0       pred mutrec_higher_order.q3/3-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:233)
>    1       pred mutrec_higher_order.q1/3-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:186)
>    2       pred mutrec_higher_order.q2/3-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:213)
>    3       pred mutrec_higher_order.repeat_steps/5-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:78)
>    4  ? 2* pred mutrec_higher_order.p2/3-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:133 and others)
>    6  ?    pred mutrec_higher_order.p3/3-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:155)
>    7  ? 2* pred mutrec_higher_order.p2/3-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:126 and others)
>    9  ?    pred mutrec_higher_order.p3/3-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:155)
>   10    2* pred mutrec_higher_order.p1/3-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:97 and others)
>   12       pred mutrec_higher_order.test/2-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:43)
>   13       pred mutrec_higher_order.main/2-0 (det) (mutrec_higher_order.m:34)

I don't think the above works, for two reasons. One, the main motivation
for detecting cliques is to that you can AVOID printing potentially thousands
of lines for a clique. (The example that motivated me to implement this change
as a stack dump that printed more than 100,000 lines, taking forever to do so.)
Simply marking the lines in a clique does not accomplish that objective.
And two, even if you wanted to just mark the calls in a clique, the above
design would not do that unambiguously. If you get output of the form

	? ...
	? ...
	? ...
	? ...
	? ...
	? ...

the programmer won't know whether these six calls come from one clique,
or from two cliques back-to-back, without looking at the names of the called
predicates, at which point the ? signs lose most of their usefulness.

Can anyone suggest what the output of a stack trace with cliques should
LOOK LIKE?

I am following all your other suggestions.

Zoltan.
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