Some precedents

During James Noble's stay, he made a number of useful observations regarding precedents for some of the features in Palimpsest.

He thinks the overall feel is similar to that of early graphical constraint systems like Borning's ThingLab, or Smith's Alternate Reality Kit. The representation of constraints as "parameters" controlling the appearance of specific layer effects reminded him of the pointer constraints used in Myers' Garnet. Finally, the way that these are assigned default values from the context in which they are created (by type inference / extension from layers further down the stack) is like the implicit parameters in the Scala language.

References

Alan Borning. 1981. The Programming Language Aspects of ThingLab, a Constraint-Oriented Simulation Laboratory. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 3, 4 (October 1981), 353-387.

Randall B. Smith. 1986. Experiences with the alternate reality kit: an example of the tension between literalism and magic. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI/GI conference on Human factors in computing systems and graphics interface (CHI '87), John M. Carroll and Peter P. Tanner (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 61-67.


Brad Vander Zanden, Brad A. Myers, Dario A. Giuse, and Pedro Szekely. 1994. Integrating pointer variables into one-way constraint models. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 1, 2 (June 1994), 161-213.