Flavors (computer science)

For the sensory impression imparted by food, see flavor. For other uses, see Flavor (disambiguation).

Flavors, an early object-oriented extension to Lisp developed by Howard Cannon at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for the Lisp machine, was the first programming language to include mixins.^[1] Symbolics used it for its Lisp machines, and eventually developed it into New Flavors; both the original and new Flavors were message passing OO models. It was hugely influential in the development of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS)^[2].

[edit] References

^ pg 46 of Thompson, C. W., Ross, K. M., Tennant, H. R., and Saenz, R. M. 1983. "Building Usable Menu-Based Natural Language Interfaces To Databases". In Proceedings of the 9th international Conference on Very Large Data Bases (October 31 - November 02, 1983). M. Schkolnick and C. Thanos, Eds. Very Large Data Bases. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 43-55.
^ "Symbolics (1985) was using New Flavors (a message-sending model, like Java today), Xerox was using CommonLoops, Lisp Machine Incorporated was using Object Lisp (Bobrow, 1986), and Hewlett-Packard proposed using Common Objects (Kempf, 1987). The groups vied with each other in the context of the standardization effort going on for Common Lisp at the time and finally settled on a standard based on CommonLoops and New Flavors." pg 108 of Veitch 1998.

"A History and Description of CLOS", by Jim Veitch. Pages 107-158 of Handbook of Programming Languages, Volume IV: Functional and Logic Programming Languages, ed. Peter H. Salus. 1998 (1st edition), Macmillian Technical Publishing; ISBN 1-57870-011-6

"New Flavors", David Moon, S Keene - Proceedings of ACM Conf. Object-Oriented Programming, Systems (ACM 1986 OOPSLA Conference), 1986
"Object-oriented programming with flavors", David A. Moon. Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications 1986, ISSN 0362-1340