C interpreters?

Ken Raeburn raeburn at athena.mit.edu
Sat May 28 21:41:37 AEST 1988


In article <850 at esunix.UUCP> bpendlet at esunix.UUCP (Bob Pendleton) writes:
>I've heard some rumors about a C interpreters called Saber. Does anyone
>know where I can get more information about it? Any information about
>commercially available, or even free, C interpreters would be
>appreciated. 

(This seems to keep coming up....)

Yes, Saber-C is an (excellent!) C interpreter.  Lots of fancy
debugging features are available, as is the ability to execute C
statements interactively.  (In version 1.x of Saber-C, all the
commands were issued in C syntax -- including preprocessor commands.
Version 2.0, in beta test, also accepts shell-style input.)

I believe Saber-C accepts either ANSI or K&R C.  It catches bad memory
references (free()'d memory, type mismatching on retrieval, bounds
checking), unused variables, missing declarations of functions
(sometimes annoying but generally correct, strictly speaking -- don't
you sometimes forget to declare malloc or include <string.h>?), link
against compiled code (though this naturally reduces the debugging
capabilities), and, of course, run your program.

The manuals I've got in front of me don't appear to list the machine
types it runs on.  I do know that it runs on the vax and the IBM
RT/PC; these are the only machine types Athena has at this point, so I
wouldn't know about any others.

The address to get more info is saber at harvard.harvard.edu.  It's also
the address for bug reports and questions.  Although Saber-C isn't
completely without bugs (and the occasional annoying misfeature), the
people I've dealt with regarding it have been most helpful in tracking
things down.

I would heartily recommend it.



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