Reversible debuggers help programmers to find the causes of misbehaviours in concurrent programs more quickly, by executing a program backwards from the point where a misbehaviour was observed, and looking for the bug(s) that caused it. Reversible debuggers can be founded on the well-studied theory of causal-consistent reversibility, which only allows one to undo an action provided that its consequences, if any, are undone beforehand. Causal-consistent reversibility yields more efficient debugging by reducing the number of states to be explored when looking backwards. Till now, causal-consistent reversibility has never considered time, which is a key aspect in real-world applications. Here, we study the interplay between reversibility and time in concurrent systems via a process algebra. The Temporal Process Language (TPL) by Hennessy and Regan is a well-understood extension of CCS with discrete-time and a timeout operator. We define revTPL, a reversible extension of TPL, and we show that it satisfies the properties expected from a causal-consistent reversible calculus. We show that, alternatively, revTPL can be interpreted as an extension of reversible CCS with time.

翻译：摘要：可逆调试器通过从观察到异常行为的点开始反向执行程序，并查找导致该行为的错误，帮助程序员更快速地定位并发程序中的异常原因。可逆调试器可建立在经过充分研究的因果一致性可逆理论基础上，该理论仅允许在撤销某个动作之前，先撤销其可能产生的后果。因果一致性可逆通过减少反向查找时需要探索的状态数量，提高了调试效率。迄今为止，因果一致性可逆理论从未考虑时间因素，而时间在现实应用中是一个关键方面。本文通过进程代数研究了并发系统中可逆性与时间的相互作用。Hennessy和Regan提出的时间进程语言（TPL）是CCS在离散时间与超时算子方向上的经典扩展。我们定义了revTPL——TPL的可逆扩展，并证明其满足因果一致性可逆演算的预期性质。此外，我们表明revTPL亦可被解释为带时间的可逆CCS的扩展。