ICON


Meaning of ICON in English

< language > A descendant of SNOBOL4 with Pascal -like syntax, produced by Griswold in the 1970's. Icon is a general-purpose language with special features for string scanning. It has dynamic types: records, sets, lists, strings, tables. If has some object oriented features but no modules or exception s. It has a primitive Unix interface.

The central theme of Icon is the generator: when an expression is evaluated it may be suspended and later resumed, producing a result sequence of values until it fails. Resumption takes place implicitly in two contexts: iteration which is syntactically loop-like ('every-do'), and goal-directed evaluation in which a conditional expression automatically attempts to produce at least one result. Expressions that fail are used in lieu of Booleans. Data backtracking is supported by a reversible assignment . Icon also has co-expression s, which can be explicitly resumed at any time.

Version 8.8 by Ralph Griswold ralph@cs.arizona.edu includes an interpreter , a compiler (for some platform s) and a library (v8.8). Icon has been ported to Amiga , Atari , CMS , Macintosh , Macintosh/MPW , MS-DOS , MVS , OS/2 , Unix , VMS , Acorn .

See also Ibpag2 .

ftp://cs.arizona.edu/icon/ , MS-DOS FTP .

Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.lang.icon .

E-mail: icon-project@cs.arizona.edu , mengarini@delphi.com .

Mailing list: icon-group@arizona.edu.

["The Icon Programmming Language", Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold, Prentice Hall, seond edition, 1990].

["The Implementation of the Icon Programmming Language", Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold, Princeton University Press 1986].

(1992-08-21)

FOLDOC computer English dictionary.      Английский словарь по компьютерам FOLDOC.