1.3. Event-action language

SystemTap's language is strictly typed, declaration free, procedural, and inspired by dtrace and awk. Source code points or events in the kernel are associated with handlers, which are subroutines that are executed synchronously. These probes are conceptually similar to "breakpoint command lists" in the GDB debugger.

There are two main outermost constructs: probes and functions. Within these, statements and expressions use C-like operator syntax and precedence.