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by pjmlp 3540 days ago
How was using Mesa/Cedar?

From my Native Oberon experience and having devoured all Xerox PARC related papers, I imagine it was a great experience.

But having used the real thing is quite different assessment.
1 comments
gumby 3540 days ago
It was fun although at that point in my life I was not comfortable with statically typed languages. So it was good for me as well.

I really just experimented in it and the (more welcoming to me) Smalltalk environment. I used InterLisp-D as my "day job" language (actually we implemented 3-Lisp in it, with some custom microcode).

BTW there was a good paper from the Mesa group which I can't find online (my copy must be buried in a box someplace) comparing the performance of counted strings vs delimited strings (e.g. [3, 'f', 'o', 'o'] vs ['f', 'o', 'o', \0] in C syntax). According to the paper the bounded strings were much faster. All three languages (Smalltalk, Mesa and Lisp) used counted strings.

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pjmlp 3540 days ago
I think that is the one discussing about ropes structures.

Thanks for the feedback.

Nowadays I use .NET and Java environments as an "almost like" experience of what mainstream computing could have looked like.

But when I see companies like Apple releasing playgrounds, Oracle adding a REPL and the edit/continue and REPL in .NET, there is some hope left.

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gumby 3540 days ago
> I think that is the one discussing about ropes structures.

No, this was simply counted vs terminated strings. I would like to find that paper and revisit the data again to see if it is still true.

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