folta@tove.umd.edu (Wayne Folta) (05/14/89)
I just read about Xerox PARC's newest OOPL, "Cedar". The article said that, unlike Smalltalk--for which PARC spun-off a commercial producer: ParcPlace-- Cedar would be distributed Public Domain. Does anyone out there know any details of Cedar, such as what it "looks like"? I'd also like to know when it might be publicly available and if it might be available for the Macintosh. Wayne Folta (folta@tove.umd.edu 128.8.128.42)
alien@cpoint.UUCP (Alien Wells) (05/27/89)
In article <17504@mimsy.UUCP> folta@tove.umd.edu.UUCP (Wayne Folta) writes: >I just read about Xerox PARC's newest OOPL, "Cedar". The article said that, >unlike Smalltalk--for which PARC spun-off a commercial producer: ParcPlace-- >Cedar would be distributed Public Domain. Does anyone out there know >any details of Cedar, such as what it "looks like"? ... I was a co-op at PARC when Cedar was started, so I have some 'historical' information that may be of interest, but I do not know anything of the current state of its implementation. Xerox developed (another) in-house language called 'Mesa' which was a strongly typed language (somewhat reminescent of Pascal) with strong modular abilities (a lot of the developers were Modula people). You developed function prototypes through definition/interface files and could 'plug-replace' different implementations. The facilities for creating your own types were very nice (for its time). Unlike Smalltalk (which Xerox 'officially' decided it had no commercial interest in), Mesa was used extensively for in-house development work of real products. The Xerox Star was developed in Mesa, as were a lot of the high-end copiers Xerox was doing. I find your comment about Cedar to be interesting, since I had thought Xerox had let Smalltalk go out public domain while keeping Mesa proprietary (despite requests from a number of universities and customers). My understanding is that Cedar was started as a development environment to surround the Mesa programming language, sort of the way the browser/etc surrounds the Smalltalk language. Thre was a lot of talk about code- sharing, language extensibility, environments, etc, etc. Sorry I can't help with more, but Cedar was just getting going when I left ('80). -- ============================================================================= A path is a terrible thing to waste ... decvax!frog!cpoint!alien bu-cs!mirror!frog!cpoint!alien =============================================================================