Programming Languages as Operating Systems (or, Revenge of the Son of the Lisp Machine)

Matthew Flatt, Robert Bruce Findler, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen

ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, 1999

Abstract

The MrEd virtual machine serves both as the implementation platform for the DrScheme programming environment, and as the underlying Scheme engine for executing expressions and programs entered into DrScheme’s read-eval-print loop. We describe the key elements of the MrEd virtual machine for building a programming environment, and we step through the implementation of a miniature version of DrScheme in MrEd. More generally, we show how MrEd defines a high-level operating system for graphical programs.

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