What is "mesa"

Mesa \Me"sa\, ?. [Sp.] A high tableland; a plateau on a hill. [Southwestern U.S.]
--Bartlett.

"high table land," 1759, from Spanish mesa "plateau," literally "table," from Latin mensa "table" (source of Rumanian masa, Old French moise "table").

n. Flat area of land or plateau higher than other land, with one or more clifflike edges

1. n. flat tableland with steep edges; "the tribe was relatively safe on the mesa but they had to descend into the valley for water" [syn: table]

2. a city just east of Phoenix; originally a suburb of Phoenix

Mesa is an innovative programming language (superseded by the Cedar language) developed in the late 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, California, United States. The language name was a pun based upon the programming language catchphrases of the time, because Mesa is a "high level" programming language.

Mesa is an ALGOL-like language with strong support for modular programming. Every library module has at least two source files: a definitions file specifying the library's interface plus one or more program files specifying the implementation of the procedures in the interface. To use a library, a program or higher-level library must "import" the definitions. The Mesa compiler type-checks all uses of imported entities; this combination of separate compilation with type-checking was unusual at the time.

Mesa introduced several other innovations in language design and implementation, notably in the handling of software exceptions, thread synchronization, and incremental compilation.

Mesa was developed on the Xerox Alto, one of the first personal computers with a graphical user interface, however most of the Alto's system software was written in BCPL. Mesa was the system programming language of the later Xerox Star workstations, and for the GlobalView desktop environment. Xerox PARC later developed Cedar, which was a superset of Mesa.

Mesa and Cedar had a major influence on the design of other important languages, such as Modula-2 and Java, and was an important vehicle for the development and dissemination of the fundamentals of GUIs, networked environments, and the other advances Xerox contributed to the field of computer science.

A mesa is an elevated area of land with a flat top, surrounded on all sides by steep cliffs.

Mesa may also refer to:

The Mesa River is a river in the Sierra de Solorio range area, Iberian System, Spain. It is a tributary of the Piedra River.

There are trout in the river, but the population of the endangered European freshwater crayfish in the river has practically disappeared owing to the introduction of the North American signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus).

Mesa ( Portuguese and Spanish for table) is the American English term for tableland, an elevated area of land with a flat top and sides that are usually steep cliffs. It takes its name from its characteristic table-top shape. It may also be called a table hill, table-topped hill or table mountain. It is larger than a butte, which it otherwise resembles closely.

It is a characteristic landform of arid environments, particularly the Western and Southwestern United States in badlands and mountainous regions ranging from Washington and California to the Dakotas and Texas. Examples are also found in many other nations including Spain, Sardinia, North and South Africa, Arabia, India, and Australia.

Grand Mesa is a large mesa located in western Colorado in the Southwest United States. Cerro Negro is a mesa in Argentina.

The term mesa is used throughout the United States to describe a flat-topped mountain or hill.

Mesa is an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification a cross-language, cross-platform, vendor-neutral standard API for interfacing with vendor-specific graphics hardware primitives. Mesa is hosted by freedesktop.org, which is also the home of the X.org and Wayland display servers, and of several open-source display drivers.

On Unix-like systems such as the BSD derivatives, or the Linux distributions, Mesa implements a vendor-independent translation layer between a graphics API such as OpenGL and the graphics hardware drivers in the operating system kernel. Besides 3D applications such as games, modern display servers ( X.org's Glamor or Wayland's Weston) use OpenGL/EGL calls to produce the screen image, therefore all graphics typically go through Mesa. Some proprietary graphics drivers replace all of Mesa, providing their own implementation of a graphics API, rather than providing a driver that Mesa talks to.

Mesa is also not specific to Unix-like operating systems: on Windows for example, Mesa provides an OpenGL API over DirectX.

Mesa was initiated in August 1993 by Brian Paul, who is still active in the project. Mesa was subsequently widely adopted, and now contains numerous contributions from various individuals and corporations worldwide, including from the graphics hardware manufacturers of the Khronos Group that administer the OpenGL specification. For Linux, development has also been partially driven by crowdfunding.