Unicon is a
programming language designed by American computer scientist Clint Jeffery with collaborators including Shamim Mohamed, Jafar Al Gharaibeh, Robert Parlett and others. Unicon descended from
Icon
An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most c ...
and a preprocessor for Icon called
IDOL
Idol or Idols may refer to:
Religion and philosophy
* Cult image, a neutral term for a man-made object that is worshipped or venerated for the deity, spirit or demon that it embodies or represents
* Murti, a point of focus for devotion or medi ...
. Compared with Icon, Unicon offers better access to the
operating system as well as support for
object-oriented programming. Unicon began life as a merger of three popular Icon extensions: an OO preprocessor named Idol, a
POSIX filesystem and networking interface, and an
ODBC facility. The name is shorthand for "Unified Extended Dialect of Icon."
Features
Compared with Icon, many of the new features of Unicon are extensions to the I/O and system interface, to complement Icon's core control and data structures. Rather than providing lower-level APIs as-is from C, Unicon implements higher level and easier to use facilities, enabling rapid development of graphic- and network-intensive applications in addition to Icon's core strengths in text and file processing.
Feature list
* Classes and packages
*
Exceptions as a contributed class library - see mailing list
* Loadable child programs
* Monitoring of child programs
* Dynamic loading of C modules (some platforms)
*
Multiple inheritance
Multiple inheritance is a feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which an object or class can inherit features from more than one parent object or parent class. It is distinct from single inheritance, where an object or ...
, with novel semantics
* ODBC database access
* dbm files can be used as associative arrays
* Posix system interface
* 3D graphics
* True concurrency (on platforms supporting Posix threads)
When run as a graphical IDE, the Unicon program ui.exe continues to offer links to Icon help.
The official Unicon programming book in PDF format is a popular way to learn Unicon. The book includes an introduction to object-oriented development as well as
UML. It includes useful chapters on topics such as the use of Unicon for CGI. Recent additions to Unicon include true
concurrency.
Unicode
Unicon is not yet
Unicode-compliant. There are opportunities posted at a help-wanted page.
Example code
procedure main()
w := open("test UNICON window", "g")
write(w, "Hello, World!")
read(w)
close(w)
end
See also
*
Rebol, a similar web-oriented expression-based language without the use of keywords
*
Curl
cURL (pronounced like "curl", UK: , US: ) is a computer software project providing a library (libcurl) and command-line tool (curl) for transferring data using various network protocols. The name stands for "Client URL".
History
cURL was fir ...
, multi-paradigm web content functional language which is also expression-based but only for client-side
*
Coroutine
Coroutines are computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperativ ...
*
Generators
*
Continuation
In computer science, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation implements ( reifies) the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computat ...
References
External links
* {{SourceForge, unicon
Unicon Programming bookPosix Interface for Unicon ADAPTING SNOBOL-STYLE PATTERNS TO UNICONJava version of Icon
Literate programs
Icon programming language family
Pattern matching programming languages
Text-oriented programming languages
SNOBOL programming language family