Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2019 February 15

= February 15 =

Airelle and Lisp
Hi all,

the Wikidata element Q2828703 refers to the french Wikipedia article fr:Airelle (langage). However this article is just a redirection of fr:Lisp. Could you please help me to understand how Airelle is connected to Lisp? The article doesn't mention Airelle. Thank you. Kind regards --Hundsrose (talk) 17:20, 15 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Airelle is an object-oriented layer/library/add-on/extension that can be used with Lisp. It is not a programming language by itself. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 18:07, 15 February 2019 (UTC)


 * On the contrary, I found several citations to a 1986 paper, written in the French language, introducing Airelle as a metalanguage. For example, Le métalangage AIRELLE, Adam & Victorri, Colloque Intelligence Artificielle de Strasbourg, 1986.  I was not able to find the full text of that paper anywhere online - not even using my local university's research library catalog.  This was published in a conference proceeding - so the standard is a little lower than a full-blown peer-reviewed research journal, and the audience is a little smaller; and after multiple decades have passed, it's going to be hard to track down unless the language really had a huge impact on the computer research community.
 * In various web search platforms, I also found other papers that cited that original work, mostly written throughout the early 1990s, but it's pretty sparse.
 * It is probably best to characterize Airelle as a defunct programming language that was only used by a small community of researchers. Most of that community published in the French language, so it will require a little extra work to find archived research.  It seems that even the organizers of the AI conference where that work was disseminated have all retired.
 * If you're proficient in French, you could peruse the webpage and publications of one of the original language authors, Bernard Victorri, at CNRS.
 * Nimur (talk) 18:34, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
 * "Metalanguage" is another way of saying what the same thing: "It is not a programming language by itself." When it was developed in the 80's, it was an add-on for Lisp (specifically Common Lisp). The idea was to allow people to easily say "This is a class and these are the attributes" without using so many parenthesis. Lisp evolved beyond the need of a meta-language to make it easy to define objects. 71.12.10.227 (talk) 16:03, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you all for your help! You really made me understand the topic better. -- Hundsrose (talk) 07:11, 18 February 2019 (UTC)