The Centaur
system was conceived as a  generic interactive environment
generator, that, 
when given the formal specification of a programming language (syntax and 
semantics), produces a language-specific environment.  
With the help of Centaur one can develop tools needed for a programming
environment: structure editors, debuggers, interpreters, and various 
translators
(for manipulating programs or objects).
It is also possible to incorporate existing tools in a Centaur-generated 
environment.  A generic system,

Sophtalk, is 
provided for communication between tools; Centaur itself is multi-process.



We include here a sampling of Centaur-related papers in an

annotated bibliography.  The papers are divided into three 
categories:
i) papers about the system, 
ii) papers about specific language environments, and
iii) papers regarding semantic aspects.  
For an introduction to the system, one can also consult 

The Centaur tutorial.




Centaur was developed under the European Community's Esprit
program in the projects: "Generation of Interactive 
Programming Environments", Gipe (1984-1989) 
and Gipe II (1989-1993).
(More information regarding the Gipe projects can be found
by clicking 
here.)



The system was distributed by 

INRIA Sophia Antipolis, 
and  used at over 100 sites.  Our users  typically were universities and 
research
centers that use the system for: teaching purposes (for compiler
construction, programming languages, semantics, etc.), or for experimenting
with programming languages, or program transformations, translations,
and verification.  Our users have experimented with Centaur for quite a 
few languages (a partial list of languages can be found 
by clicking 
here.)



At INRIA, the 
Croap group developed and distributed Centaur.  It was 
a tool for our research in the design and implementation of programming tools.
This work ranged from a study of formal languages and their semantics to 
the means for integrating heterogeneous tools in an interactive system.


Centaur itself was a meta-system, for generating generic programming
environments.  One such generated environment has been commercialized
in the area of scientific computing; 
Simulog
offers a wide range
of products for 
Fortran and the parallelization of existing code
towards various target architectures.



 This web page used to be maintained by Janet Bertot at inria and
      Laurent Thery at inria