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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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

"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)[reply]

Thank you all for your help! You really made me understand the topic better. -- Hundsrose (talk) 07:11, 18 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]