Vault

Last update Fri May 17, 2002

MD5 checksum: E23DA87E244500E0FE591ED9850622F8

Vault is a prototype programming language created at Microsoft Research. It's a safe version of the C programming language, with features to record and enforce usage rules associated with interfaces. The rules control the order in which the interface's functions may be called and its data accessed.

This distribution is the initial release of the Vault tools, including the compiler and linker. The documentation for these tools is available at the Vault web site. We welcome questions, comments, and bug reports to vault@microsoft.com. However, since this is a research prototype and not a Microsoft product, you should expect limited support and are not encouraged to use Vault for a critical part of a development project.

Distribution

The distribution contains the following subdirectories:

• bin, containing the tools' executables
• inc, containing headers included in Vault compiled code
• lib, containing the Vault standard libraries
• examples, containing a few sample Vault programs
• doc, containing the grammar of Vault programs

Installation

Prerequisites

• In order to compile Vault programs down to executables, you need the Microsoft C compiler and linker (cl.exe and link.exe).
  Without those tools you can still type check Vault programs and translate them to C (use the -v switch).

Installer actions

The installation carries out the following steps:

1. Sets the environment variable VAULT to the name of the top-level Vault installation directory.
2. Adds the absolute path for the bin subdirectory to the user's PATH environment variable.

After these steps, you should be able to type nmake in the examples subdirectory to compile the example programs.

Uninstall

Uninstallation is performed through the Windows Add/Remove function from the control panel. Uninstallation will properly undo the environment variable modifications.

Older versions