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The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language (1986)

www2.cs.arizona.edu

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Re: The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language (1986)

#4

Post by kabdib »

dwheeler wrote: post #3

Another book in this genre is "Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation". "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" had a lot of discussion about language implementation too.

Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice is one of my favorite books on language implementation. It's dated (the machines targeted were things like 8Mhz 68000 boxes) but details and pragmatics of bootstrapping your way into a working system from a tape dump are a fun read.

Re: The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language (1986)

#5

Post by patrickg_zill »

Fascinating language, very interesting to see the nice way that it progresses as long as it "succeeds" e.g. via Wikipedia:

"In addition, the < operator returns its second argument if it succeeds, allowing things like if a < b < c, a common type of comparison that in most languages must be written as a conjunction of two inequalities like if a < b && b < c"

Re: The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language (1986)

#7

Post by textmode »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #5

Fascinating language, very interesting to see the nice way that it progresses as long as it "succeeds" e.g. via Wikipedia: "In addition, the < operator returns its second argument if it succeeds, allowing things like if a < b < c, a common type of comparison that in most languages must be written as a conjunction of two inequalities like if a < b && b < c"

What would a Maybe something like

    lt(a,b) lt(b,c) ...
   end
where ... is optional rest of statement that only gets executed if a Or ... might be a statement on a new line

    lt(a,b) lt(b,c) :s(d)f(end)
   d ...
   end

Re: The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language (1986)

#8

Post by open-source-ux »

There is a successor to the Icon language called Unicon. Like Icon, its strength lies in text processing. It incorporates all of Icon's features while adding object-oriented capabilities. It's in active development but completely off the radar of the main programming scene.

The main website could do with a facelift.

https://unicon.sourceforge.io/

It's a shame these languages aren't studied more because they have some unique ideas that we could all learn from.

Re: The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language (1986)

#10

Post by theoh »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #5

Fascinating language, very interesting to see the nice way that it progresses as long as it "succeeds" e.g. via Wikipedia: "In addition, the < operator returns its second argument if it succeeds, allowing things like if a < b < c, a common type of comparison that in most languages must be written as a conjunction of two inequalities like if a < b && b < c"

This might also be of interest: http://www.vestasys.org/lim/
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