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The work in the thesis presents an animation extension (CHRvis) to Constraint Handling Rules (CHR). Visualizations have always helped programmers understand data and debug programs. A picture is worth a thousand words. It can help identify where a problem is or show how something works. It can even illustrate a relation that was not clear otherwise. CHRvis aims at embedding animation and visualization features into CHR programs. It thus enables users, while executing programs, to have such executions animated. Due to the wide range of algorithms implemented through CHR, an algorithm-based animation was needed. Such animation should show at each step in time the changes to the data structure affected by the algorithm. The work aims at providing the operational semantics for CHRvis. The correctness of CHRvis programs is also discussed. Some applications of the new extension are also introduced. In addition, CHRvis was used to build a visual language for CHR. This eliminates the need of learning any syntax constructs before building CHR programs. CHRvis was also found to be effective in enhancing the learning gain of its users.

The work in the paper presents an animation extension (CHR^{vis}) to Constraint Handling Rules (CHR). Visualizations have always helped programmers understand data and debug programs. A picture is worth a thousand words. It can help identify where a problem is or show how something works. It can even illustrate a relation that was not clear otherwise. CHR^{vis} aims at embedding animation and visualization features into CHR programs. It thus enables users, while executing programs, to have such executions animated. The paper aims at providing the operational semantics for CHR^{vis}. The correctness of CHR^{vis} programs is also discussed.

The work in the paper presents an animation extension ($CHR^{vis}$) to Constraint Handling Rules (CHR). Visualizations have always helped programmers understand data and debug programs. A picture is worth a thousand words. It can help identify where a problem is or show how something works. It can even illustrate a relation that was not clear otherwise. $CHR^{vis}$ aims at embedding animation and visualization features into CHR programs. It thus enables users, while executing programs, to have such executions animated. The paper aims at providing the operational semantics for $CHR^{vis}$. The correctness of $CHR^{vis}$ programs is also discussed. Some applications of the new extension are also introduced.

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) has matured into a general purpose language over the past two decades. Any general purpose language requires its own development tools. Visualization tools, in particular, facilitate many tasks for programmers as well as beginners to the language. The article presents on-going work towards the visualization of CHR programs. The process is done through source-to-source transformation. It aims towards reaching a generic transformer to visualize different algorithms implemented in CHR. Note: An extended abstract / full version of a paper accepted to be presented at the Doctoral Consortium of the 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2014), July 19-22, Vienna, Austria., An extended abstract / full version of a paper accepted to be presented at the Doctoral Consortium of the 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2014), July 19-22, Vienna, Austria

In this paper, we propose an extension of Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) with different visualization features. One feature is to visualize the execution of rules applied on a list of constraints. The second feature is to represent some of the CHR constraints as objects and visualize the effect of CHR rules on them. To avoid changing the compiler, our implementation is based on source-to-source transformation.