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).