1-1  PURPOSE OF THIS DOCUMENT

This document provides a rationale for the main design decisions in the RED language. In contrast to the Language Reference Manual, which describes what the language facilities are, this report explains why these features are present and how they are used. Particular attention is paid to design alternatives for the various language facilities, and reasons are supplied for the acceptance or rejection of the alternative approaches. Programming examples of various sizes illustrate the usage of the RED language, and an appendix to this document contains a set of programs, representative of embedded applications, whose specifications were supplied by DoD.

1.2  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This document was written by

Dr. Benjamin Brosgol
Dr. Mark Davis
Dr. Bruce Knobe,
Prof. Barbara Liskov (M.I.T.),
Craig Schaffert, and
Prof. William Wulf (Carnegie-Mellon).

Programming examples were provided by

Prof. Paul Abrahams (N.Y.U.),
Mr. Ronald Hubbard,
Dr. Bruce Knobe
Prof. David Levine (Boston College), and
Prof. Robert Smith, Jr. (Rutgers).

We are grateful for the assistance of

Mr. Peter Belmont,
Ms. Toby Boyd,
Dr. Fred Martin,
Mr. John Nestor, and
Ms. Mary Van Deusen

We are particularly appreciative of the strong typing, despite overloading, provided by

Miss Judith Haigh (the project librarian) and
Ms. Margi Robison

We are grateful to Mr. Brian Reid (Carnegie-Mellon), whose SCRIBE text-formatting system was used to generate the manuscript, and to Mr. Michael Tighe, whose Diablo driver program greatly eased the task of producing the final copy.