Director Guide

Abstract

Director is a programming language designed for dynamic graphics, artificial intelligence, and use by computer-naﶥ people. It is based upon the actor or object oriented approach to programming and resembles Act 1 and SmallTalk. Director extends MacLisp by adding a small set of primitive actors and the ability to create new ones. Its graphical features include an interface to the TV turtle, quasi-parallelism, many animation primitives, a parts/whole hierarchy and a primitive actor for making and recording "movies". For artificial intelligence programming Director provides a pattern-directed data base associated with each actor, an inheritance hierarchy, and a means of conveniently creating non-standard control structures. For use by naﶥ programmers Director is appropriate because of its stress upon very powerful, yet conceptually simple primitives and its verbose, simple syntax based upon pattern matching. Director code can be turned into optimized Lisp which in turn can be compiled into machine code.