jennifer@cwi.nl (Jennifer Steiner) (06/24/87)
In article <822@newton.praxis.co.uk> kees@praxis.co.uk (Kees Goossens) writes: >Could you give me some pointers to (introductionary) books/articles >about Mesa please? > >An Algol68 lover... Here is a list of the references I've found for Mesa: -------- %T Experience with Processes and Monitors in Mesa %A B.W. Lampson %A D.D. Redell %Y Xerox Corporation 3333 Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 %J Communications of the ACM %V 23 %N 2 %P 105-117 %D February 1980 %X The use of monitors for describing concurrency has been much discussed in the literature. When monitors are used in real systems of any size, however, a number of problems arise which have not been adequately dealt with: the semantics of nested monitor calls; the various ways of defining the meaning of WAIT; priority scheduling; handling of timeouts, aborts and other exceptional conditions; interactions with process creation and destruction; monitoring large numbers of small objects. These problems are addressed by the facilities described here for concurrent programming in Mesa. Experience with several substantial applications gives us some confidence in the validity of our solutions. %K concurrency, condition variable, deadlock, monitor, operating system, process, synchronization, task %T The Impact of Mesa on System Design %A H.C. Lauer %A E.H. Satterhwaite %J Proceedings 4th Intl. Conf. Software Engineering %I IEEE %C Munich %D 1979 %P 174-182 %X The Mesa programming language supports program modularity in ways that permit subsystems to be developed separately but to be bound together with complete type safety. Separate and explicit interface definitions provide an effective means of communication, both between programs and between programmers. A configuration language describes the organization of a system and controls the scopes of interfaces. These facilities have had a profound impact on the way we design systems and organize development projects. This paper reports out recent experience with Mesa, particularly its use in the development of an operating system. It illustrates techniques for designing interfaces, for using the interface language as a specification language, and for organizing a system to achieve the practical benefits of programs modularity without sacrificing strict type-checking. %T Mesa Language Manual, Version 5.0 %A J.G. Mitchell %A W. Maybury %A R. Sweet %I Xerox PARC %R CSL-79-3 %C Palo Alto, CA %D April 1979 %T Early Experience with Mesa %A C.M. Geschke %A J.H. Morris Jr. %A E.H. Satterthwaite %J CACM %D August 1977 %V 20 %N 8 %P 540-553 %X The experiences of Mesa's first users -- primarily its implementers -- are discussed, and some implications for Mesa and similar programming languages are suggested. The specific topics addressed are: module structure and its use in defining abstractions, data-structuring facilities in Mesa, an equivalence algorithm for types and type coercions, the benefits of the type system and why it is breached occasionally, and the difficulty of making the treatment of variant records safe. -------- Tot je dienst, Jennifer Steiner jennifer@cwi.nl