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Early experience with Mesa

Published: 01 August 1977 Publication History

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.

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cover image Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM  Volume 20, Issue 8
Aug. 1977
74 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/359763
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 August 1977
Published in CACM Volume 20, Issue 8

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  1. data structures
  2. modules
  3. programming languages
  4. systems programming
  5. types

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