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 analysing 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 tutorials/articles that’ll help you master Icon.
1. The Icon Analyst
The Icon Analyst provided in-depth coverage of Icon with an emphasis on programming. It focused on technical aspects of the Icon programming language. It ceased publication in 2001 but remains a valuable resource.
2. The Icon Newsletter edited by Ralph E. Griswold, Madge T. Griswold, and Gregg M. Townsend
The Icon Newsletter focused on topical information about the Icon programming language. Sixty issues were published between 1979 and 2000.
3. Fundamentals of the Icon Programming Language by William H. Mitchell
This is the full set of slides for a fifteen-hour course on Icon.
4. An Overview of the Icon Programming Language; Version 9 by Ralph E. Griswold
This article offers a good introduction to the language.
All tutorials in this series:
Free Programming Tutorials | |
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Icon | High-level, general-purpose language |
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