Recent progress in logic programming (e.g., the development of the Answer Set Programming paradigm) has made it possible to teach it to general undergraduate and even middle high school students. Given the limited exposure of these students to computer science, the complexity of downloading, installing and using tools for writing logic programs could be a major barrier for logic programming to reach a much wider audience. We developed onlineSPARC, an online answer set programming environment with a self contained file system and a simple interface. It allows users to type edit logic programs and perform several tasks over programs, including asking a query to a program, getting the answer sets of a program, and producing a drawing animation based on the answer sets of a program.
As ASP has been applied to more and more problems, the importance of ASP software development tools has been realized by the community. Some integrated development environment (IDE) tools, e.g., APE @cite_12 , ASPIDE @cite_20 , iGROM @cite_16 and SeaLion @cite_15 have previously been developed. They provide a graphical user interface for users to carry out a sequence of tasks from editing an ASP program to debugging that program, easing the use of ASP significantly. However, the target audience of these tools is experienced software developers. Compared with the existing environments, our environment is online, self contained (i.e., fully independent of the users' local computers) and provides a very simple interface, focusing on teaching only. The interface is operable by any person who is able to use a typical web site and traverse a file system.
@cite_15 @cite_20 @cite_12 @cite_16
33233687 1654219887 1512925707 2274394000
It has been recognised that better programming tools are required to support the logic programming paradigm of Answer Set Programming (ASP), especially when larger scale applications need to be developed. In order to meet this demand, the aspects of programming in ASP that require better support need to be investigated, and suitable tools to support them identiﬁed and implemented. In this paper we detail an exploratory development approach to implementing an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for ASP, the AnsProlog* Programming Environment (APE). APE is implemented as a plug-in for the Eclipse platform. Given that an IDE is itself composed of a set of programming tools, this approach is used to identify a set of tool requirements for ASP, together with suggestions for improvements to existing tools and programming practices. We report about the current state and designated features of the tool SeaLion, aimed to serve as an integrated development environment (IDE) for answer-set programming (ASP). A main goal of SeaLion is to provide a user-friendly environment for supporting a developer to write, evaluate, debug, and test answer-set programs. To this end, new support techniques have to be developed that suit the requirements of the answer-set semantics and meet the constraints of practical applicability. In this respect, SeaLion benefits from the research results of a project on methods and methodologies for answer-set program development in whose context SeaLion is realised. Currently, the tool provides source-code editors for the languages of Gringo and DLV that offer syntax highlighting, syntax checking, refactoring functionality, and a visual program outline. Further implemented features are a documentation generator, support for external solvers, and visualisation as well as visual editing of answer sets. SeaLion comes as a plugin of the popular Eclipse platform and provides itself interfaces for future extensions of the IDE. Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming. In the last few years, several tools for ASP-program development have been proposed, including (more or less advanced) editors and debuggers. However, ASP still lacks an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) supporting the entire life-cycle of ASP development, from (assisted) programs editing to application deployment. In this paper we present ASPIDE, a comprehensive IDE for ASP, integrating a cutting-edge editing tool (featuring dynamic syntax highlighting, on-line syntax correction, autocompletion, code-templates, quick-fixes, refactoring, etc.) with a collection of user-friendly graphical tools for program composition, debugging, profiling, database access, solver execution configuration and output-handling. When deploying Answer Set Programming ASP in an industrial context, for instance for re-configurationi¾ź[5], knowledge engineers need debugging support on non-ground programs. Current approaches to ASP debugging, however, do not cover extended modeling features of ASP, such as choice rules, conditional literals, cardinality and weight constraintsi¾ź[13]. To this end, we encode non-ground ASP programs using extended modeling features into normal logic progams; this encoding extends existing encodings for the case of ground programs [4,10,11] to the non-ground case. We subsequently deploy this translation on top of an existing ASP debugging approach for non-ground normal logic programsi¾ź[14]. We have implemented and tested the approach and provide evaluation results.