dcall@amadeus.la.tek.com (Dale Call) (01/24/89)
Does someone out there have a phone number and address for Saber Software of Cambridge, Mass.? They have a product called "Saber-C", a C software development system that sounds interesting. Any reviews also appreciated. Dale
galvin-peter@yale-bulldog.arpa (Peter Baer Galvin) (02/01/89)
Saber Software Inc. 30 JFK Street Cambridge MA 02138 (617) 876-7636 I haven't used it but I've heard good things about it. If you send them $25 or a blank TK-50 cartridge they will send you a "free evaluation kit" which I would guess is a demo. No affiliation of course. --Peter Peter Baer Galvin (203)432-1254 Senior Systems Programmer, Yale Univ. C.S. galvin-peter@cs.yale.edu 51 Prospect St, P.O.Box 2158, Yale Station ucbvax!decvax!yale!galvin-peter New Haven, Ct 06457 galvin-peter@yalecs.bitnet
dudek@uunet.uu.net (Glen Dudek) (02/03/89)
dcall@amadeus.la.tek.com (Dale Call) writes: >Does someone out there have a phone number and address for Saber Software >of Cambridge, Mass.? Saber Software can be reached at: Saber Software, Inc. 30 JFK Street Cambridge, MA 02138 617 876-7636 Disclaimer: I am friends with the folks who developed Saber - I will try to be objective but I urge you to evaluate it yourself. I think it is a great software development system. It nicely integrates the edit<->compile<->debug steps, using your usual editor of course. It has a good windowing interface for Suntools and/or X. It can handle very large applications. It is ANSI-C compatible. It has a combined dbx-style and 'C'-expression command interface. Saber supports per-workstation or floating licenses. It has a *complete* interpreter. Now, I know what you're thinking, but don't be put off by the interpreter. It will load object code as well as source, and it loads code faster than the compiler can compile. Execution of source can be slow, but it is the price you pay for the extra error checking. The extra error checking is worth it - it can find the nastiest bugs in minutes instead of days (e.g., stomping on pointers, using freed memory, walking off the end of static or dynamically allocated data structures, etc.). It is a giant step beyond lint - programmers at MIT who want to qualify the level of debugging that source code has passed use the term 'saberized' for the highest level. Saber even found a latent bug in 'cat' (variable used before set)! I witnessed one of the most graphic (sorry :-) demonstrations of the power of Saber was in the earlier stages of Saber's development. One of the developers wanted to learn about programming X applications, so he simply loaded the X object library Xlib.a into the interpreter. He then made interactive calls to routines in Xlib to create, map, and manipulate a window, in seconds. Compare this with writing a 'C' prototype program to experiment with X, with an edit-compile-link cycle between attempts. I was at an X toolkit tutorial at the first MIT X conference, and the creators of the X toolkit praised Saber highly. Saber Software offers (or at least offered) a free evaluation. Try it! Glen Dudek dudek@ksr.com