Even leashing may not be enough for very large parses or queries because of the sheer number of ports displayed. The ALE debugger also provides a facility for auto-skipping. Whereas turning leashing off at a kind of step is like automatically answering c (advance to next port) at those steps, auto-skipping is like automatically answering s, which advances to the next exit or fail port of the current step without stopping at or even displaying the ports in between. The command for this is dskip/1, and its argument is of the same form as the argument to dleash/1. The signs have a different meaning, of course. For example, dskip(+empty) means that you want the debugger to auto-skip steps of kind empty, i.e., not stop and ask, whereas dleash(+empty) means that you want to leash steps of kind empty, i.e., stop and ask. When a step where auto-skipping is set is encountered, it is displayed with an automatic reply without stopping, e.g.:
Call: empty category? <auto-skip> Exit: empty category? <auto-skipped> Edge added: Number:0, Left:1, Right:1, Rule:empty Call: close chart edge under rule application?