An Outline of Arizona

This paper outlines a system called Arizona, now under development at the U. of Washington. Arizona is intended to be a portable, public-domain collection of tools supporting scientific computing, quantitative graphics, and data analysis, implemented in Common Lisp[31] and CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System)[4]. Although there is substantial implementation of some of the modules described below, this paper is more a description of a design than of an actual program. One excuse for writing a paper on not-yet existing software is that Arizona is intended primarily as a research vehicle; it is hard to predict when, if ever, it will mature and stabilize to the point of robust production-quality code. However, we hope that the ideas embodied in its design are of interest in themselves and of use in future scientific computing and data analysis systems (eg. a “New New S”[2]). Discussion of the philosophy underlying Arizona can be found in [22, 23, 19, 20, 24, 32]. Briefly, the design is motivated by our belief that an ideal system for scientific computing and data analysis should have: