Unicon (programming language)

Short description: Programming language descended from Icon

UniconParadigm| object-oriented, procedural

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Designed by| Clint Jeffery
OS| Cross-platform: Windows, Unix
License| GNU General Public License
Website| unicon.sourceforge.net
Influenced by
Icon

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 and a preprocessor for Icon called IDOL. 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."

## Contents

* 1 Features
* 2 Feature list
* 3 Unicode
* 4 Example code
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 External links

## 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, with novel[1] semantics
* ODBC database access[2]
* dbm files can be used as associative arrays
* Posix system interface
* 3D graphics[3]
* True concurrency (on platforms supporting Posix threads)[4]

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[5] 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.[6]

## 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, multi-paradigm web content functional language which is also expression-based but only for client-side
* Coroutine
* Generators
* Continuation

## References

1. ↑ Clinton Jeffery (August 1998). "Closure-Based Inheritance and Inheritance Cycles in Idol". https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2420091.
2. ↑ "Unicon ODBC Interface". http://unicon.org/utr/utr1/utr1.htm.
3. ↑ "Unicon 3D Graphics - User's Guide and Reference Manual". http://unicon.org/utr/utr9c.pdf.
4. ↑ "Unicon Threads - User’s Guide and Reference Manual". http://unicon.org/utr/utr14.pdf.
5. ↑ "Programming with Unicon". http://unicon.org/book/ub.pdf.
6. ↑ "Help Wanted!". http://unicon.org/helpwanted.html.

## External links

* Unicon (programming language) on SourceForge.net
* Unicon Programming book
* Posix Interface for Unicon
* ADAPTING SNOBOL-STYLE PATTERNS TO UNICON
* Java version of Icon
* Unicon at 99-bottles
* Literate programs

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