The Seed7 Homepage is at https://seed7.net/index.htm

Seed7 is a high level general purpose programming language. The Seed7 project is open-source. There is an interpreter and a compiler. The compiler translates Seed7 programs to C programs which are subsequently compiled to machine code.

• As an extensible programming language it supports user defined statements and operators.
• The whole language is not hard-coded in the compiler but defined via include-libraries (syntactically and semantically).
• Types are first class objects (Templates and generics can be defined easily without special syntax).
• All Seed7 functions can be executed at compile-time or at run-time.
• 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.
• Seed7 is operating system and architecture independent.
• Seed7 programs are source code portable without any need to change the code.
• Exception handling is supported (e.g. an integer overflow raises OVERFLOW_ERROR).
• Source code debugging is supported.
• The types bigInteger and bigRational support numbers of unlimited size.
• Functions, operators and statements can be overloaded.
• There are various predefined types like array, hash, set, struct, color, time, duration, etc.
• Seed7 runs under Linux, MacOS, various Unix versions and Windows.
• Interpreter, compiler and the example programs use the GPL license, while the runtime library uses the LGPL license.

• The libraries provide the same functionality under all supported operating systems.
• Numerous standard libraries allow writing programs without calling functions from third party libraries.
• There is a database independent API, which can connect to MySQL, MariaDB, SQLLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, ODBC, Firebird, Interbase, Db2, Informix and SQL Server databases.
• There is a 2-D graphic library which uses X11 under Linux, GDI under Windows and JavaScript in the Browser.
• Parser and interpreter are part of the run-time library.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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