mesa.scroll

import ../code/conceptPage.scroll

id mesa
name Mesa
appeared 1970
tags pl

fileType text
wordRank 8191
centralPackageRepositoryCount 0
country United States
originCommunity Computer Systems Laboratory

wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language)
 related algol java modula-2 bcpl modula-3 pascal c sparc ada solaris
 summary Mesa is a programming language developed in the late 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California, United States. The language name was a pun based upon the programming language catchphrases of the time, because Mesa is a "high level" programming language. Mesa is an ALGOL-like language with strong support for modular programming. Every library module has at least two source files: a definitions file specifying the library's interface plus one or more program files specifying the implementation of the procedures in the interface. To use a library, a program or higher-level library must "import" the definitions. The Mesa compiler type-checks all uses of imported entities; this combination of separate compilation with type-checking was unusual at the time.Mesa introduced several other innovations in language design and implementation, notably in the handling of software exceptions, thread synchronization, and incremental compilation. Mesa was developed on the Xerox Alto, one of the first personal computers with a graphical user interface, however most of the Alto's system software was written in BCPL. Mesa was the system programming language of the later Xerox Star workstations, and for the GlobalView desktop environment.  Xerox PARC later developed Cedar, which was a superset of Mesa. Mesa and Cedar had a major influence on the design of other important languages, such as Modula-2 and Java, and was an important vehicle for the development and dissemination of the fundamentals of GUIs, networked environments, and the other advances Xerox contributed to the field of computer science.
 pageId 19962
 created 2001
 backlinksCount 41
 revisionCount 187
 dailyPageViews 37
 appeared 1970

hopl https://hopl.info/showlanguage.prx?exp=769