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The Mesa Programming Environment Richard E. Sweet Xerox Palo Alto Research Center 3333 Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, California 94304 1. Introduction 2. History and Philosophy People everywhere are developing multi-window, Much of the early history and design motivation integrated programming environments for their favorite behind the Mesa language project was reported in Early computers and languages. This paper describes the Mesa Experience with Mesa [Geschke77]. This section deals programming facilities of the Xerox Development with the history and design goals of the programmer's Environment (XDE). It is interesting for several reasons. environment that grew up around the language. This It has existed in something similar to its current form for paper principally concerns the facilities on individual about 5 years. It has more than 500 users, many programmers' workstations, although a good bit of their interacting with it 8 or more hours a day. Several million power comes from being part of a larger network lines of code have been written by these users, including environment. In addition to the workstations, this large, multi-author systems. network contains a number of server machines. Some Previous papers have dealt with the Mesa language servers are used for central storage of files, some for [Geschke77, Mitchell79], the operating system [Redell79, printing, some for communications with the outside Lampson80] and the processor architecture on which it world, and some provide small specialized services. The runs [Johnsson82, Sweet82]. This paper describes the individual workstation, nonetheless, provides the majority programming environment: the user illusion, the set of of a programmer's computing power. programming tools, and the facilities available for augmenting the environment. Section 2 gives a short 2.1 Chronology history of the environment, including some of our original design goals. Section 3 describes the current Mesa was first implemented on the Alto [Thacker79] state of the user interface and discusses a few of the in 1976. The development environment was the Alto schemes that were tried and discarded. Section 4