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ATLAST is an attempt to make software component technology and open
architecture applications commonplace in the mainstream software
market. It is both a software component which can be readily
integrated into existing applications, providing them a ready-made
macro language and facilities for user extension and customisation
and, at the same time, it is a foundation upon which new applications
can be built in an open, component-oriented manner.
ATLAST was developed at Autodesk, Inc. Autodesk returned the rights
to me in 1991, and I subsequently placed the program in the public
domain.
ATLAST is based upon the FORTH-83 language, but has been extended in
many ways and modified to better serve its mission as an embedded
toolkit for open, programmable applications. ATLAST is implemented in
a single file, written in portable C; it has been ported to many
different machines and operating systems, including MS-DOS, OS/2, the
Macintosh, and a wide variety of Unix machines. ATLAST includes
native support for floating point, C-like strings, Unix-compatible
file access, and a wide variety of facilities for embedding within
applications. Integers are 32 bits and identifiers can be up to 127
characters; extensive stack and heap pointer checking is available to
aid in debugging. ATLAST may be configured at compilation time to
include only the facilities needed by a given application, thus saving
memory and increasing execution speed (when error checking is
disabled).
---John Walker.
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