A structural view of the Cedar programming environment

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the Cedar programming environment, focusing on its overall structure—that is, 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. Its primary purpose is to increase the productivity of programmers whose activities include experimental programming and the development of prototype software systems for a high-performance personal computer. The paper emphasizes the extent to which the Cedar language, with run-time support, has influenced the organization, flexibility, usefulness, and stability of the Cedar environment. It highlights the novel system features of Cedar, including automatic storage management of dynamically allocated typed values, a run-time type system that provides run-time access to Cedar data type definitions and allows interpretive manipulation of typed values, and a powerful device-independent imaging model that supports the user interface facilities. Using these discussions to set the context, the paper addresses the language and system features and the methodologies used to facilitate the integration of Cedar applications. A comparison of Cedar with other programming environments further identifies areas where Cedar excels and areas where work remains to be done.