A foundation for programming environments

Recent work on generating tools and techniques have significantly eased the design and construction of programming environments (PEs). Concurrently, advances in workstation hardware have enhanced both the potential capabilities and performance of PEs. We argue that, to capitalize on these two developments, various deficiencies in traditional languages and operating systems must be avoided. To this end, we have developed Pegasus, a system to serve as a software foundation for the construction and execution of PEs. It consists of a concurrent functional programming language, the run-time support for this language, and a core library of standard tools and utilities. We present a discussion of Pegasus, its current state, and directions for future development.