> (There have also been actual C interpreters, some of which had strict adherence to the abstract semantics, cf (available online in the Usenix summer 1988 proceedings).)
I used one of these a little, Saber-C, circa 1990, on a Sun SPARCstation. It was glorious, and several steps beyond the Turbo C IDE on MS-DOS that I'd been using at home as a teen.
One of the big wins of Saber-C, before Purify and the later fancy open source memory checkers, was that it could quickly find memory problems. One of my mentors spent some evenings doing a Saber-C-powered memory-bug-search&destroy blitz through an open source Unix X11 game. (I think our own code had less need of help like that, so less Saber-C low-hanging-fruit fun.)
I used one of these a little, Saber-C, circa 1990, on a Sun SPARCstation. It was glorious, and several steps beyond the Turbo C IDE on MS-DOS that I'd been using at home as a teen.
One of the big wins of Saber-C, before Purify and the later fancy open source memory checkers, was that it could quickly find memory problems. One of my mentors spent some evenings doing a Saber-C-powered memory-bug-search&destroy blitz through an open source Unix X11 game. (I think our own code had less need of help like that, so less Saber-C low-hanging-fruit fun.)
https://archive.org/details/1988-proceedings-summer-san-fran...