An eclectic-pencil blog » ICON

ICON 9.5 released

Administrator — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:47:35 +0000

This was posted to the ICON news group:

Version 9.5 of Icon is now available for downloading from the Icon
website,
www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/v950

This release incorporates accumulated bug fixes, code cleanup, and a
new feature allowing loaded C code to return opaque external data structures.

For more information, see the release notes at
www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/v950/relnotes.htm

Gregg Townsend
Computer Science (retired)
The University of Arizona

Congratulations to Gregg, Carl Sturtivant and others involved.

Other ICON developments continue at ObjectIcon over at code.google

For other text processing languages, see our posts on REBOL, Converge and Curl (not, cURL, but Curl)

iPad and eBook app’s

Administrator — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:59:03 +0000

I posted a note over at aule-browser in response to David Frum on the iPad.

ICON 9.5 beta underway

Administrator — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:58:47 +0000

I did a build of the latest ICON programming language beta – there were a few little hitches building for X graphics under Windows.

First the browser brought in the file as a .tar (it is a .tar.gz) so I just renamed it when saving it. WinZip opened it fine.

Then built the configuration for X by starting Cygwin and going to the ICON beta directory and running

make CONFIGURE name=xcygwin

which ran fine, and then

make name=xcygwin

which took a few minutes but ran fine as well.

Then xwin & to launch an X manager and a right-click on that icon to select an Xterm.

There the next hitch: after changing to the ICON bin directory, no ./vib.exe or other would run until I did an

export ICONX=./iconx.exe

then all was well.

The most important changes are for interfacing with C.

For more information visit the ICON project at http://.cs.arizona.edu/icon

Icon key generator

Administrator — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:02:59 +0000

Over at my other blog I have a post on Icon, the language.

One thing that Python did not pick up from Icon is key()

The method to obtain keys from a dictionary object in Python is keys().

The procedure in classic Icon is key(a_dict). Why key() and not keys()?

Because key() is a generator.

key() provides one key at a time.

Tcl/Tk IDE for SNOBOL

Administrator — Sun, 24 May 2009 16:01:52 +0000

If you are interested in pattern-matching languages but never learned SNOBOL, you might try the IDE by Rafal M. Sulejman.

If you are using linux, just make a few edits to the tksliderc file to flip the slash delimiters and set the path to your SNOBOL4. I also replaced the gvim entry with gedit but had to give an editor parameter of –new-window as it refused to add a tab to a running instance. A very handy feature is “Save Transcript” which for starters will save the hot-key guide when you first start the IDE.

If you like python or converge, you will be at home with the indenting. And there is SNOBOL for python in SnoPy.

I can only hope that someone extends the editor with XOTcl. SNOBOL patterns are also available for UNICON, one of the OOP variants of ICON, the language which evolved from the SNOBOL5 project.

It would appear that SNOBOL was the first language accidentally released as open-source (part of the story preserved in the Griswold papers here in MPLS at UMN.)

The story of SNOBOL and performance can be found by a google on SPITBOL over at duckduckgo.com

For another OOP-variant of ICON (this one with UNICODE) see the objecticon project ( a name choice as regrettable as ICON and UNICON as any web search will reveal.)

For a pythonic variant of ICON, see converge. For the latest on-going contribution of ICON to programming languages, see Fibers in Ruby 1.9