Mesa (programming Language) - Descendants

Descendants

• Mesa was the precursor to the programming language Cedar. Cedar's main additions were garbage collection, dynamic types, a limited form of type parameterization, and special syntax to identify the "type-safe" parts of a multi-module software package.
• The United States Department of Defense approached Xerox to use Mesa for its "IronMan" programming language, but Xerox declined due to conflicting goals. Xerox PARC employees argued that Mesa was a proprietary advantage that made Xerox software engineers more productive than engineers at other companies. The Department of Defense instead eventually chose and developed the Ada programming language from the candidates.
• The original Star Desktop evolved into the ViewPoint Desktop and later became GlobalView which was ported to various Unix platforms, such as SunOS Unix and AIX, A Mesa to C compiler was written and the resulting code compiled for the target platform. This was a workable solution but made it nearly impossible to develop on the Unix machines since the power of the Mesa compiler and associated tool chain was lost using this approach. There was some commercial success on Sun SPARC workstations in the publishing world, but this approach resulted in isolating the product to narrow market opportunities.
• In 1976, during a sabbatical at Xerox PARC, Niklaus Wirth became acquainted with Mesa, which had a major influence in the design of his Modula-2 language
• Java explicitly refers to Mesa as a predecessor.