Last Updated on May 22, 2022
Icon is a high-level, general-purpose language that contains a wide variety of features for processing and presenting symbolic data — strings of characters and structures — both as text and as graphic images.
Icon has a large repertoire of operations for manipulating structures — records, lists, sets, and tables — and extensive capabilities for processing strings of characters. At the heart of Icon is a goal — directed expression-evaluation mechanism that simplifies many programming tasks. Storage is allocated automatically — you never have to worry about allocating space — and garbage collection reclaims unused space as necessary.
Applications of Icon include analyzing natural languages, reformatting data, generating computer programs, manipulating formulas, formatting documents, artificial intelligence, rapid prototyping, and graphic display of complex objects, and more.
Here’s our recommended free books that’ll help you master Icon.
1. The Icon Programming Language by Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold
This book describes Version 9.3 of the Icon programming language.
The first 11 chapters of this book describe the main features of Icon. Chapter 12 contains an overview of Icon’s graphics facilities, and Chapter 13 describes features of Icon that do not fit neatly into other categories. Chapter 14 provides information about running Icon programs. Chapter 15 describes libraries of Icon procedures available to extend and enhance Icon’s capabilities. Chapter 16 deals with errors and diagnostic facilities. Chapters 17 through 20 illustrate programming techniques and provide examples of programming in Icon.
The reader of this book should have a general understanding of the concepts of computer programming languages and a familiarity with the current terminology in the field. Programming experience with other programming languages, such as Pascal or C, is desirable.
This book was originally published by Peer-to-Peer Communications. It’s out of print and the rights have reverted to the authors, who placed it in the public domain.
2. Graphics Programming in Icon by Ralph E. Griswold, Clinton L. Jeffery, and Gregg M. Townsend
Chapters cover:
- Introduction to the language.
- Basic concepts of Icon graphics.
- Drawing operations: lines, points, arcs, and more.
- Icon’s “turtle graphics” procedures.
- Facilities for reading and writing strings of text
- Use of color.
- Patterns and Images
- Use multiple windows, use and sharing of graphics contexts, and interaction with the underlying graphics window system.
- Input events including polling, blocking, synchronization with output, and complications raised by multiple windows.
- Interface components (buttons, sliders, and more)
- VIB – Icon’s interactive interface builder.
- Program construction.
- Additional dialogs.
- Case studies.
To use this book, you should have some programming experience (not necessarily a knowledge of Icon), some experience with applications that use graphics (but not necessarily any experience in graphics programming), and access to a PC.
This book was originally published by Peer-to-Peer Communications. It’s out of print and the rights have reverted to the authors, who placed it in the public domain.
3. The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language by Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold
The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language is a study of an implementation of Icon. It differs from usual books on compilers in emphasizing the implementation of run-time facilities and handling of sophisticated language features.
The book focuses on central issues of the implementation of the language.
You need a general familiarity with programming languages and a general idea of what is involved in implementing a complex software system.
This book originally was published by Princeton University Press. It’s out of print and the rights have reverted to the authors, who placed it in the public domain.
4. Graphics Facilities for the Icon Programming Language by Gregg M. Townsend, Ralph E. Griswold
The Icon programming language provides a large set of platform-independent facilities for graphical input and output. The implementation includes numerous functions and keywords specifically for graphics. These are augmented by additional library procedures that add higher-level capabilities.
This document describes the graphics facilities of Version 9.3 of Icon. A knowledge of Icon is assumed. Previous experience with computer graphics is helpful.The body of the text presents a survey Icon’s graphics capabilities. Full descriptions of the functions, attributes, and other items appear in appendices.
5. Icon Programming Language Handbook by Thomas W. Christopher
This book is designed to serve two purposes: to introduce the reader to Icon and to be a reference for Icon.
As an introduction to programming in Icon, the handbook assumes you already know how to program in some other procedural programming language — C or Pascal, say.
All books in this series:
| Free Programming Books | |
|---|---|
| Ada | ALGOL-like programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages |
| Agda | Dependently typed functional language based on intuitionistic Type Theory |
| Arduino | Inexpensive, flexible, open source microcontroller platform |
| Assembly | As close to writing machine code without writing in pure hexadecimal |
| Awk | Versatile language designed for pattern scanning and processing language |
| Bash | Shell and command language; popular both as a shell and a scripting language |
| BASIC | Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code |
| C | General-purpose, procedural, portable, high-level language |
| C++ | General-purpose, portable, free-form, multi-paradigm language |
| C# | Combines the power and flexibility of C++ with the simplicity of Visual Basic |
| Clojure | Dialect of the Lisp programming language |
| ClojureScript | Compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript |
| COBOL | Common Business-Oriented Language |
| CoffeeScript | Transcompiles into JavaScript inspired by Ruby, Python and Haskell |
| Coq | Dependently typed language similar to Agda, Idris, F* and others |
| Crystal | General-purpose, concurrent, multi-paradigm, object-oriented language |
| CSS | CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) specifies a web page’s appearance |
| D | General-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax |
| Dart | Client-optimized language for fast apps on multiple platforms |
| Dylan | Multi-paradigm language supporting functional and object-oriented coding |
| ECMAScript | Best known as the language embedded in web browsers |
| Eiffel | Object-oriented language designed by Bertrand Meyer |
| Elixir | Relatively new functional language running on the Erlang virtual machine |
| Erlang | General-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional language |
| F# | Uses functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming methods |
| Factor | Dynamic stack-based programming language |
| Forth | Imperative stack-based programming language |
| Fortran | The first high-level language, using the first compiler |
| Go | Compiled, statically typed programming language |
| Groovy | Powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language |
| Haskell | Standardized, general-purpose, polymorphically, statically typed language |
| HTML | HyperText Markup Language |
| Icon | Wide variety of features for processing and presenting symbolic data |
| J | Array programming language based primarily on APL |
| Java | General-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, high-level language |
| JavaScript | Interpreted, prototype-based, scripting language |
| Julia | High-level, high-performance language for technical computing |
| Kotlin | More modern version of Java |
| LabVIEW | Designed to enable domain experts to build power systems quickly |
| LaTeX | Professional document preparation system and document markup language |
| Lisp | Unique features - excellent to study programming constructs |
| Logo | Dialect of Lisp that features interactivity, modularity, extensibility |
| Lua | Designed as an embeddable scripting language |
| Markdown | Plain text formatting syntax designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write |
| Objective-C | Object-oriented language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to C |
| OCaml | The main implementation of the Caml language |
| Pascal | Imperative and procedural language designed in the late 1960s |
| Perl | High-level, general-purpose, interpreted, scripting, dynamic language |
| PHP | PHP has been at the helm of the web for many years |
| PostScript | Interpreted, stack-based and Turing complete language |
| Prolog | A general purpose, declarative, logic programming language |
| PureScript | Small strongly, statically typed language compiling to JavaScript |
| Python | General-purpose, structured, powerful language |
| QML | Hierarchical declarative language for user interface layout - JSON-like syntax |
| R | De facto standard among statisticians and data analysts |
| Racket | General-purpose, object-oriented, multi-paradigm, functional language |
| Raku | Member of the Perl family of programming languages |
| Ruby | General purpose, scripting, structured, flexible, fully object-oriented language |
| Rust | Ideal for systems, embedded, and other performance critical code |
| Scala | Modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based language |
| Scheme | A general-purpose, functional language descended from Lisp and Algol |
| Scratch | Visual programming language designed for 8-16 year-old children |
| SQL | Access and manipulate data held in a relational database management system |
| Standard ML | General-purpose functional language characterized as "Lisp with types" |
| Swift | Powerful and intuitive general-purpose programming language |
| Tcl | Dynamic language based on concepts of Lisp, C, and Unix shells |
| TeX | Markup and programming language - create professional quality typeset text |
| TypeScript | Strict syntactical superset of JavaScript adding optional static typing |
| Vala | Object-oriented language, syntactically similar to C# |
| VHDL | Hardware description language used in electronic design automation |
| VimL | Powerful scripting language of the Vim editor |
| XML | Rules for defining semantic tags describing structure ad meaning |