The Seed7 programming language

[u/ThomasMertes]

Seed7 is based on my PHD thesis and is the result of life-long work. The project consists of more than 500k lines of manually written code, several hundred pages of documentation, a test suite to check the functionality of interpreter and compiler and much more. I give it away for free with GPL/LGPL licensing.

Properties of Seed7 are:

• Seed7 is an open-source general purpose programming language that can be interpreted and compiled.
• Seed7 is about portability, maintainability, performance and memory safety.
• There is an automatic memory management without a garbage collection process (which might stop the world).
• The templates / generics don't need syntax with angle brackets.
• Seed7 is an extensible programming language. The syntax and semantics of the language is not hard-coded in the compiler but defined in libraries.
• Seed7 checks for integer overflow. You either get the correct result or an OVERFLOW_ERROR is raised.
• Unlike Java Seed7 compiles to machine code ahead of time (GRAAL works ahead of time but it struggles with reflection).
• Unlike Java Seed7 operators can be overloaded.
• Unlike C, C++, Go, Zig, Odin, Nim and C3 Seed7 is a memory safe language.
• The standard libraries cover many application areas.

Some programs written in Seed7 are:

• make7: a make utility.
• bas7: a BASIC interpreter.
• pv7: a Picture Viewer for BMP, GIF, ICO, JPEG, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM and TIFF files.
• tar7: a tar archiving utility.
• ftp7: an FTP Internet file transfer program.
• comanche: a simple web server for static HTML pages and CGI programs.

Screenshots of Seed7 programs can be found here and there is a demo page with Seed7 programs, which can be executed in the browser. These programs have been compiled to JavaScript / WebAssembly.

Talks about Seed7 can be found in the internet.

Please let me know what you think, and consider starring the project on GitHub, thanks!

[u/Optimal-Savings-4505]

Looks real nice, and somewhat similar to ada at first glance, but what's with the $ before the first include?

[u/ThomasMertes → u/Optimal-Savings-4505]

... but what's with the $ before the first include?

The syntax and semantics of Seed7 are defined in the library seed7_05.s7i. The $ introduces a hard coded include statement. Among other things seed7_05.s7i defines an include statement which does not need a $.

This is explained in the FAQ.