"The Proteus interpreter was developed by Lars S. Nyland, while I was a post-doc at UNC in the winter of 91-92. I relied heavily on the ISETL interpreter, changing the
grammar to Proteus, adding parallelism and private variables. I must thank Gary Levin (et al) for all the work they did to give me a starting point for Proteus.
This version was compiled with Think-C (c) Symantec Screen Editor based on the THINK C Class Library. The interactive line editor was derived from ILE written by Robert C. Pendleton (c) 1988, Evans & Sutherland. This program was developed while the author was a member of the Clarkson faculty, using the Z200 provided by the school. West Publishing has provided a Macintosh for further refinement of the Mac version. West has also provided support for the development of the PC and Mac graphics features.
There are many people who have contributed to the ideas behind ISETL. First and foremost is Ed Dubinsky, whose idea it was to use SETL for teaching Discrete Mathematics. His dissatisfaction with the old implementation suggested this project. Others include: Nancy Baxter, Don Muench, and that mysterious bunch that we just call IWEST."
AUTHORS:
Lars S. Nyland
COPYRIGHT:
(c) 1993 Lars Nyland and Gary Levin
INTERNET SITES:
ftp://ftp.cs.unc.edu/pub/projects/proteus/bin/
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Date: Mon, 12 Jun 1995 08:36:16 -0400
From: "Lars S. Nyland" <nyland@cs.unc.edu>
To: "Antreas P. Hatzipolakis" <xpolakis@athena.compulink.gr>
Antreas> I have a question about the language name: Why the greek name PROTEUS?
In our limited understanding of Greek history, we found the name to have connotations that we desired. Here are some of the words from the thesaurus that helped us choose it.
Of course, it has other connotations about instability, but we chose to ignore those.
We were looking for a word that meant "looks like whatever the viewer wants to see."
Our programming language is designed to apply to many different
parallel computers, yet the programmer who is programming the xyz computer from the abc manufacturer would see Proteus as a programming language for his machine.