Editing Mesa (programming language) (section)

==Descendants==
*The [[United States Department of Defense]] approached Xerox to use Mesa for its "IronMan" programming language (see [[Steelman language requirements]]), but Xerox declined due to conflicting goals.  Xerox PARC employees argued that Mesa was a proprietary advantage that made Xerox software engineers more productive than engineers at other companies.  The Department of Defense instead eventually chose and developed the [[Ada (programming language)|Ada programming language]] from the candidates.
*The original Star Desktop evolved into the ViewPoint Desktop and later became [[GlobalView]] which was ported to various Unix platforms, such as [[Solaris (operating system)|SunOS Unix]] and [[AIX operating system|AIX]]. A Mesa to [[C Programming Language|C]] compiler was written and the resulting code compiled for the target platform. This was a workable solution but made it nearly impossible to develop on the Unix machines since the power of the Mesa compiler and associated tool chain was lost using this approach. There was some commercial success on Sun SPARC workstations in the publishing world, but this approach resulted in isolating the product to narrow market opportunities.
*In 1976, during a sabbatical at Xerox PARC, [[Niklaus Wirth]] became acquainted with Mesa, which had a major influence in the design of his [[Modula-2]] language.<ref>{{cite book |doi=10.1145/1238844.1238847 |chapter-url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1238847 |first=Niklaus |last=Wirth | title=Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages | chapter=Modula-2 and Oberon |pages=3-1–3-10 |location=San Diego |year=2007 |citeseerx=10.1.1.91.1447 |isbn = 978-1-59593-766-7|s2cid = 1918928}}.</ref>
* [[Java (programming language)|Java]] explicitly refers to Mesa as a predecessor.<ref>{{cite book |url=http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/intro.doc.html#237601 |title=Java Language Specification |first1=James |last1=Gosling |author-link=James Gosling |first2=Bill |last2=Joy |author-link2=Bill Joy |first3=Guy |last3=Steele |author-link3=Guy Steele |first4=Gilad |last4=Bracha |author-link4=Gilad Bracha |edition=2nd}}</ref>