Awesome

Welcome to the world of Seed7

Seed7 is a general purpose programming language described at the Seed7 Homepage.

Seed7 is a higher level language compared to Ada, C++ and Java. The Seed7 interpreter and the example programs are open-source software. There is also an open-source Seed7 compiler. The compiler translates Seed7 programs to C programs which are subsequently compiled to machine code.

Features of Seed7

• As an extensible programming language it supports user defined statements and operators.
• Types are first class objects (Templates and generics can be defined easily without special syntax).
• Predefined constructs like arrays or for-loops are defined in libraries.
• Object orientation supports interfaces and multiple dispatch.
• Static type checking and the absence of automatic casts help to find errors at compile-time.
• There is an automatic memory management that works without a garbage collection process.
• Exception handling and source code debugging are supported.
• If an integer computation overflows the exception OVERFLOW_ERROR is raised.
• Numbers which have unlimited size are provided with the types bigInteger and bigRational.
• Functions, operators and statements can be overloaded.
• There are various predefined types like array, hash, set, struct, color, time, duration, etc.
• Seed7 programs are source code portable without any need to change the code.
• Seed7 provides a database independent API, which can connect to MySQL, MariaDB, SQLLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, ODBC, Firebird, Interbase, Db2 and SQL Server databases databases.
• Seed7 runs under Linux, various Unix versions and Windows.
• The interpreter and the example programs use the GPL license, while the runtime library uses the LGPL license.

What is contained in this package

The Seed7 package contains the Seed7 interpreter in source besides documentation files, include files and program examples. The following sub directories exist:

• src The source of the interpreter
• prg Program examples
• lib Include / library files
• doc Documentation files
• bin Executables and runtime libraries

Using the extension several files can be distinguished:

• *.txt Documentation files
• *.sd7 Program example files
• *.s7i Include / library files
• *.dna Include file for the dna program
• *.c C source file
• *.h C include file

How to compile the interpreter

For Linux this is quite simple (to compile under other operating systems see seed7/src/read_me.txt). The makefile is prepared for Linux. First make sure that gcc, make and the development packages for X11 and ncurses are installed. Then go to the seed7/src directory and type:

make depend
make

After the compilation the interpreter is linked to the file seed7/prg/s7. The Seed7 compiler (s7c) is compiled with:

make s7c

The compiler executable is copied to the bin directory. To check interpreter and compiler with a test suite (chk_all.sd7) use the command:

make test

Finally Seed7 can be installed with:

sudo make install

To do several compilation attempts in succession you need to execute the command

make clean

before you do make depend again.

The file seed7/src/read_me.txt contains a detailed explanation of the compilation process.

How to compile under other operating systems

Seed7 supports several operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X and various Unix variants. How to compile under these operating systems is explained in the file seed7/src/read_me.txt.

How to execute a program

After compiling the interpreter you can make the first test. Switch to the seed7/prg directory and type:

./s7 hello

This executes the hello world program which is in the hello.sd7 file. Every file with the .sd7 extension can be executed with the s7 interpreter.

A list of the program files with a short description can be found in the file: prg/files.txt.

What to do when there are problems with the compilation

The file seed7/src/read_me.txt discusses the compilation process with more detail.

How to send a patch

Just send a pull request to the GitHub repository of Seed7. Participation is always welcome. If you send a pull request, it is assumed that your change is released under the GPL (or LGPL for libraries) license.

Greetings Thomas Mertes