Unicon is a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

designed by American computer scientist Clint Jeffery with collaborators including Shamim Mohamed, Jafar Al Gharaibeh, Robert Parlett and others. Unicon descended from

Icon An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Catholic Church, Catholic, and Lutheranism, Lutheran churches. The most common subjects include Jesus, Mary, mother of ...

and a preprocessor for Icon called IDOL. Compared with Icon, Unicon offers better access to the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

as well as support for

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impl ...

. Unicon began life as a merger of three popular Icon extensions: an OO preprocessor named Idol, a

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

filesystem and networking interface, and an

ODBC In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. An ...

facility. The name is shorthand for "Unified Extended Dialect of Icon."

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 Multiple inheritance is a feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which an object or class can inherit features from more than one parent object or parent class. It is distinct from single inheritance, where an object ...

, with novel semantics * ODBC database access * dbm files can be used as associative arrays * Posix system interface * 3D graphics * True concurrency (on platforms supporting Posix threads) 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 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 Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

-compliant. There are opportunities posted at a help-wanted page.

Example code

procedure main() w := open("test UNICON window", "g") write(w, "Hello, World!") read(w) close(w) end

Features

Feature list

Unicode

Example code

See also

References

External links