What are the pros and cons of the Icon programming language?

Question

Hello,

Recently I was searching for icons(graphics), but I see a link that was very intersting, was a language called Icon, then I want to know:

• There is someone here that have already tried to develop in Icon?
• It's a compiled or interpreted language?
• What are the pros and cons of this language?
• In which area it's better than some other languages(garbage collection...)?

Answer 1

Yes, I have used Icon and found it to be an interesting language. In particular, it has a yield operator which allows a subroutine to return a possible answer, but to keep its state in case another answer is required. Among other things, this makes coroutines and other interesting things possible to be implemented cleanly.

Answer 2

It resembles Pascal. You have to compile it.

Answer 3

Just check out the Icon Programming Language Wikipedia page. That will answer most of your questions.

Answer 4

it's discussed here - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/136

unicon is a more popular, extended implementation (it is a fork of icon that is better supported and has objects) - http://unicon.sourceforge.net/index.html

i haven't used it, but i know that it has quite a long history - it never became very popular but its use of generators influenced languages like python.

see also

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon%5Fprogramming%5Flanguage
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicon%5F%28programming%5Flanguage%29

unicon includes an interpreter and a compiler for both icon and unicon languages - http://unicon.org/utr/utr11.html

also, it's supposed to be particular good at string processing.