d i g i t a l SRC Technical Note 1997-005c

The Vesta-2 Software Description Language

Allan Heydon, Jim Horning, Roy Levin, Timothy Mann, Yuan Yu

Note #1997-005c. June 24, 1997. Revised June 2, 1998.

Vesta-2 is a software configuration management system. Developers use Vesta-2 to build and manage potentially large scale software. The instructions for building a software artifact are written in the Vesta-2 software description language (SDL). Evaluating a Vesta-2 SDL program causes the artifact to be constructed.

This note describes the syntax and semantics of the Vesta-2 SDL. It is a reference manual for use by Vesta-2 users. The language is functional, uses lexical scoping, and is dynamically typed. It includes a single primitive function for invoking external tools like compilers and linkers as function calls.

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