Abstract
The Mesa language and run-time environment were designed for the purpose of building systems programs such as compilers, operating systems, graphics software and so on. It is a relatively high-level language with strong type checking and supports the ideas of modular programming and abstract data types. Although the system is compiler-based, one can debug programs interactively in source-language terms. The language has been in rather heavy use since 1976 by a programming community of a few hundreds of professional programmers within the Xerox Corporation, and a large amount of code has been written in it. This talk will give a designer's retrospective view of Mesa from the vantage point of a serious user and will attempt to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses as a vehicle for systems programming.
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