Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Basic Structure

In response to the need for simplified access to data contained inside the SunOS kernel, the SymbEL (pronounced “symbol”) language was created and the SymbEL interpreter, se, was developed. SymbEL resembles C visually and contains many similar syntactic structures. This orthogonality was done for ease of use and to leverage existing programming knowledge.

First Program

Since the best way to learn a new language is through example, let’s look at an example SymbEL program.

main() 
{
  printf("hello, world\n"); 
}

This program shows that the language structure is similar to C. This similarity does not imply that you can pick up a book on C and start writing SymbEL programs. There are a lot of differences, and the interpreter lets ...