April 1998
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
16h 11m
English
book
Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition
by Adrian Cockcroft, Richard Pettit
Content preview from Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
Chapter 17. The SymbEL Language
SymbEL is an interpretive language, based on C, that was created to address the need for simplified access to data residing in the SunOS kernel. Although kernel interface API libraries have made this data more available to C application programmers, it is still out of reach by means other than writing and compiling a program. The goal was to create a language that did not need compilation to run and would allow the development of scripts that could be distributed to a large audience via e-mail without sending very large files or requiring the end user to possess a compiler.
The control and data structures of SymbEL are extensive enough to allow a complex program to be written, but the language is not burdened ...