The structure of Cedar

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).

Hierarchical modularity

“…Examples are make [Feldman 1979], Odin [Clemm 1994], the System Modelling language of Mesa and Cedar [Mitchell et al 1979;Lampson and Schmidt 1983a;1983b;Swinehart et al 1985], and Vesta [Levin and McJones 1993;Hanna and Levin 1993;Chiu and Levin 1993]. Group descriptions play the same role for CM that system models play for Vesta and makefiles play for make.…”

Software Techniques for Non-Von Neumann Architectures

“…Table 4-4 identifies twenty-nine languages that are used for parallel programming. [Perrott, et al 1987] AL [Webb 1989] APPLY [Webb 1989] Blaze [Keolbel, et al 1987] Cantor [Athas, et al 1988] Concurrent Pascal [Hansen 1975] CONSUL [Baldwin 1987] CSP [Segall, et al 1985 [Kung, et al 1982] Mesa/Cedar [Swinehart, et al 1985] MLP [Lang, et al 1988] MP [Segall, et al1985] Multilisp [Halstead 1986] Multi-Pascal [Lester, et al 1987 [Li, et al 1985] VECTRAN [Paul 1984] W2 [Gross, et al 1986] XX [Snyder 1984]…”

Personal distributed computing: the Alto and Ethernet software

“…It also had a large assortment of generally useful packages: an integrated editor for structured documents, a powerful graphics package, a relational database system, remote procedure calls, user-programmable interpretation of the keyboard and mouse, and a screen manager based on icons and non-overlapping windows [51,53].…”