A specificational approach to high level program monitoring and measuring

Program monitoring and measuring is the activity of collecting information about the execution characteristics of a program. Although this activity is occasionally supported by special-purpose hardware, it is normally done by adding instrumentation code to the program so that it collects interesting data as it runs. Unfortunately, this alteration is itself a difficult task involving all the complexities of programming. Given some questions to be answered, the programmer must determine what data must be collected, determine where in the program those data can be collected, and add code to the program to collect that data and to process it to produce the desired results. The goal of the work described is to automate the process. A high-level program monitoring and measuring system is presented. The system provides a high-level specification language to let programmers specify what they want to know about their program's execution. It automatically generates an augmented program whose execution produces both the results of the original program and answers to the specified questions.<
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