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Overview

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Overview

1. Overview

The Alto/Mesa environment contains all of the facilities described in this document. Section 2 contains an enumeration of the definitions modules available in the Alto/Mesa system; it includes a brief description of the facilities provided by each interface. Complete documentation can be found in Section 5.

Section 3 describes the various configurations and optional packages that comprise the Alto/Mesa system. A single configuration of the system is available which includes most of the facilities described here. Operations are described that destroy the display and keyboard software. A number of optional packages are available so that the Mesa system can be tailored to each application.

The Mesa Executive (Section 4) is a simple (and small) optional user interface supporting only a few commands. It allows program loading and debugger communication; more complicated operations must be provided by the user or by one of the standard packages that is available separately. The Mesa Executive also supports interactive input. The standard system only supports command line input; this allows the user interface to be completely controlled by the application.

Finally, the bulk of this manual (Section 5) contains detailed descriptions of each of the packages summarized in Section 2.

Further details are available elsewhere on the language (Mesa Language Manual) and the Debugger (Mesa Debugger Documentation). Information on obtaining and running the system is contained in the Mesa User’s Handbook.