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Show Due to this limited goal, debugging develops only rudimentary mechanisms needed in conversational computing. These mechanisms include a limited monitoring and controlling capabilities of debuggers. Another limitation of debuggers is that the language used in debuggers is different than the language used in debugged program. Introspection can be easily used to construct powerful debuggers, but the opposite is not true. Since introspection is built on different assumptions about the use of monitoring and controlling than debuggers, implementing introspection with debugging mechanisms would be very inefficient. Monitors and debuggers are a special class of systems called reactive systems [29]. A reactive system monitors the environment and reacts to it. An application of reactive systems to distributed application management is described in [52]. A reactive system monitors the environment through sensors and responds through actuators. These sensors and actuators are prespecified in the sense that there is only a limited set of sensors and actuators that a reactive system might use. Translated in the language o f reactive systems, the goal of introspection is to provide a complete set of elementary sensors and actuators such that any possible sensor and actuator might.be constructed from them. Using approaches of reactive systems, the handling of a complete set of sensors and actuators is impractical due to a prohibitive overhead, but introspection provides a framework that eliminates most of this overhead. 12 |
