Talk:Mesa (programming language)

Very interesting. No mention of Dorado (is that the name of a xerox workstation? I thought mesa was first implemented on it)? What is the meaning and relevance of the last paragraph, about Ada? --drj

The Dorado was a high performance xerox workstation developed at Xerox PARC for internal use in the early 1980s. It was not marketed. Esnickell2 (talk) 16:51, 18 September 2009 (UTC) (Not citeable. Based on personal knowledge.)[reply]

It was the inspiration for Modula-2 when its author spent time with Xerox as an undergraduate. What? Niklaus Wirth was the author of Modula-2... and I think he was well past undergraduate by then! --NickelKnowledge

I have no problem with the connection, I was complaining about the undergraduate bit. --NK

(Comment removed, since the main article contains the same information. Esnickell2 (talk))

Well this is all very good. Someone wrote that cedar came before mesa, but http://www.parc.xerox.com/hist-lst.html claims it was the other way round, so I changed it. That also accords with my very vague 3rd or 4th info. Cedar was designed to interop more easily with C and Modula wasn't it? --drj

Mesa/Ada "elegance" - POV?

Ada is a far more verbose language and lacks Mesa's elegance. Is there a less opinionated way to say this? (Some people feel that...) - Eric 23:13, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you, and have deleted that bit, as it fails the NPOV test. "Elegance" is subjective, and does not belong properly to the field of computer science or an encyclopedia. RobLinwood 23:07, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Elegance may not belong in an encyclopedia, but it is a commonly used word in mathematics, science, and, yes, computer science. 69.201.168.196 (talk) 02:57, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Descendants

I moved some text around to separate information about the language from that about languages it has influenced. I feel that this makes the article more focused and clear by putting the most relevant information at the beginning, and by not viewing Mesa as a mere historical footnote. RobLinwood 23:12, 26 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Link to Cedar programming language

The article has a link to Cedar programming language, but Cedar programming language currently just redirects to Mesa programming language — oops! As someone who has been trying to find out more about Cedar for many years, I find this really frustrating. I guess the "right" solution is for someone to turn Cedar programming language into a real article. Does anyone reading this know enough about Cedar to start work? I'll gladly help. —Chris Chittleborough 10:14, 26 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ah ... that should of course be Cedar (programming language). Now that there's a copy of the closest thing Cedar had to a reference manual online here, I'll try to expand the coverage of Cedar. However, I'm not sure we'll have enough information for a separate article. CWC alias Chris Chittleborough 13:18, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Fwiw, http://www.oberon2005.ru/paper/wt1984-01e.pdf is a copy of a paper which is a tour through Cedar (not the programming language, but the closely-related experimental programming environment). The scan does contain some barely readable snippets of Cedar code for those interested. Be aware that Cedar was programmed using Cedar's hierarchical Tioga editor. The practice was to have logical programming units ("procedures", "blocks", etc) be sub-nodes of the first line, which led to the unusual situation where a closing "}" was one indent further in than the matching "{". Also, Tioga had a mechanism to mark nodes in the true as comments, and a compiler reading a tioga source file would not even see the comment text. By convention, comment nodes tended to be all bold or all italics, but there is no comment token visible on the display, such as C's "--" or lua's "//". Esnickell2 (talk) 17:17, 18 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

DoD wanted Mesa for its High Order Language

The article currently says that

The United States Department of Defense approached Xerox to use Mesa for its "IronMan" programming language, but Xerox management turned them down. The Department of Defense instead created the Ada programming language.

We've had similar claims in this article for a long, long time, but never had a cite for it. I suspect it's an urban myth, and so should be removed. Comments, please? CWC 13:18, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Judging from recent good edits by 66.201.51.66 (whose ISP is based in Palo Alto, and who clearly has inside knowledge of Mesa), this is not an urban myth and should not be removed. It would be better to have a cite for it, though .... CWC 12:33, 18 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To recent contributor

To the person who recently edited this article from IP address 66.201.51.66:

Thanks, that was good work.
I've left a message for you at here in case your IP address is static; if you haven't seen it yet, please read it and consider registering at Wikipedia, because we can always use more good editors.

Cheers, CWC 12:38, 18 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Code snippets ahoy!

This article is lacking examples of Mesa code --Sigmundur (talk) 21:34, 15 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

yes, a 'hello world' would be nice --Alastair Rae (talk) 10:48, 20 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Docutech software was written in Mesa.

The Mesa language was also used on the early Docutech systems, which utilized Mesa processors. Yamex5 (talk) 19:17, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cedar before SPARC

Cedar was developed years before SPARC was, so a native SPARC compiler could hardly have been a feature. 69.201.168.196 (talk) 03:00, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

True. "The Structure of Cedar" by Swinehart et al appeared in July 1985. The first published architecture spec for SPARC was v7 in 1986. I would guess that Xerox at some stage (1990ish?) wanted to move to RISC for performance (their in-house CPUs relied heavily on microprogramming, making pipelining very hard), and picked SPARC.

Anyhow, I've changed that line to read "and later a native compiler for Sun SPARC workstations". I wonder if Xerox ever sold that compiler in a product? If so, I'd love to read the documentation.

Cheers, CWC 22:28, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There's a complex relationship between PARC and SPARC: PARC development of an "Artificial Intelligence Workstation" abandoned their proprietary processor in favour of SPARC and became the Sun4d#SPARCserver_1000 and Cray CS6400 not to mention the successor Sun Enterprise range. The foundation paper is "SparcCenter 2000: multiprocessing for the 90s" presented at Compcon Spring '93 jointly authored by big teams from both companies, but I can't locate a copy online MarkMLl (talk) 20:50, 9 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Exception handling?

"they hired a recent M.S. graduate from Colorado who had written his thesis on exception handling" A link to this thesis would be nice it it were available, and I'm sure the un-credited anonymous soul would not mine his or her name mentioned here. "Credit where due"? At the very least, a reference of some sort so that the quoted statement is not just rumor. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.71.25.218 (talk) 17:09, 14 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've slapped a "who" template on that, since elsewhere Wp credits James G. Mitchell (at PARC) who was Canadian rather than Coloradorian (?) MarkMLl (talk) 20:36, 9 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

cedar redirect

When trying to follow links to Cedar (programming language) which should take me to this page, the android Wikipedia app gives me an error, which I've not had before. The redirect does work in a browser, but maybe someone can spot something wrong with the redirect? Feydun (talk) 10:28, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please ignore the above message as i have just obtained that error message for a different article, so it must be a problem with the Wikipedia app, not with the redirect code. Feydun (talk) 10:54, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]