why arent there any c-interpreter ?

[David S. Herron]

In article <6396 at harrier.ukc.ac.uk> dac at ukc.ac.uk (David Clear) writes:
>In article <3303 at medusa.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> admerlev at medusa.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Arnd Merlevede ) writes:
>>i would like to know why there aren't any c-interprters out there.
>>it would be nice to test small pieces of code interactively...
>
>HiSoft in the UK do a C interpreter for the Atari ST. That proves they exist.

There is also Saber-C which runs on a few Unix (4.3BSD) platforms
and is an *extremely* nice debugging environment.  It includes a
gee-whizzy-wig graphical interface that shows code as you're tracing
through it, draws pictures of the data structures being used, draws
pictures of cross-references between procedures, and has a "compiler"
that is both pickier than lint and is smarter than lint since it doesn't
complain about silly things like lint will do.

>I think interpreting C is as close to blasphemy as you can get with a
>programming language.

No, my son, thou doesn't comprehend ... many times one comes to solutions
by adding another level of indirection.  (<-- recursive operation)  In the
case of Saber C that level gives you run time checking of lots of things
which are hard/impossible with `C' like

	array bounds checking
	blowing away information malloc() uses internally for memory allocation
	using variables before being set
	parameter checking (I know.. this is an ANSI C feature, but I don't
		have any ANSI C compilers available to me besides GNU-CC)

	etc..

>Dave.

	David

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