Cedar(ID:1035/ced002)

Xerox PARC. Superset of Mesa, adding garbage collection, dynamic types and a universal pointer type (REF ANY). A large complex language designed for custom Xerox hardware and the Cedar OS/environment. Data types: atoms, lists, ropes ("industrial strength" strings), conditions. Multiprocessing features include threads, monitors, signals and catch phrases. Used to develop the Cedar integrated programming environment.

People:
Related languages
Euclid => Cedar   Evolution of
Mesa => Cedar   Evolution of
Cedar => Modula-3   Derivation of
References:
  • Lampson, Butler "A Description of the Cedar Language", Xerox PARC, CSL-83-15 (Dec 1983). view details
  • Swinehart, D. et al, "The Structure of Cedar" view details Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the Cedar programming environment, focusing primarily on its overall structure: the major components of Cedar and the way they are organized. Cedar supports the development of programs written in a single programming language, also called Cedar. We will emphasize the extent to which the Cedar language, with runtime support, has influenced the organization, comprehensibility, and stability of Cedar. Produced in the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Cedar is a research environment supporting the development and use of experimental programs, emphasizing office information and personal information management applications. Although it was clear that some unsolved problems would be addressed, the intent was to combine well-understood methods and technologies to exploit a new generation of high-performance personal computers, including the Xerox 1132 (Dorado) and Xerox 1108 (Dandelion).
          in SIGPLAN Notices 20(07) July 1985 (Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 85 symposium on Language issues in programming environments) view details
  • Skillicorn, David B. and Talia, Domenico "Models and languages for parallel computation" pp123-169 view details
          in [ACM] ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 30(2) June 1998 view details
    Resources
    • Programming languages and compilers by Butler Lampson
      Cedar (1979-82): With Jim Horning, Paul Rovner and others, I designed the extensions which produced Cedar by adding a safe subset, automatic storage deallocation, and runtime types to Mesa. I wrote a definition of Cedar semantics in terms of a much simpler kernel language, and a language manual [Cedar Language Reference Manual, Technical Report CSL-84-1, Xerox PARC, 1984].external link