Early experience with Mesa

  • Authors:
  • Charles M. Geschke;James H. Morris, Jr.;Edwin H. Satterthwaite

  • Affiliations:
  • Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1977

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Abstract

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.