Kent Palmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You make a good point, I completely skipped ICON. > I used Snobol for years and then one day I > wondered if there had been any updates to the > language and ran in to Icon and Unicon, but by > that time Unicon already existed.
I haven't tried Snobol but discovered Icon the way probably many people did, through the noweb literate programming system (in which I later lost interest). In those days I was using mostly MS-DOS, and Icon ran on MS-DOS. I did play around a little with Idol, the proto-Unicon. One of my earliest uses of Icon was to manipulate structured PostScript, because I had an Apple printer with no front panel and my computer was a mere 80286 that couldn't run Windows 3.x and the LaserWriter utility. My printer was a more powerful computer than my computer. :) What may cause me to use the XML parser is an attempt to free myself from the grip of the beautiful disaster that is TeX, and use Icon to put font to paper, which is a hobby. I am physically disabled these days and can write only really small programs because of it, so the situation would be hopeless without a higher level language. The 'ant' typesetting program, written in Caml, shows that you don't really need a lot of code if you use a good programming language, and ant has an embedded scripting language, but it still is largely macroprocessor-based like TeX and the scripting language is primitive. My idea is that I'll be able to write Unicon/Icon code instead of macros, and let compiling and linking be part of the workflow. It would help for this sort of work if Icon had better support for linking with external libraries, although it works pretty well if you are passing only simple numbers and character strings. Another problem with Unicon that gets in the way of new users is that you still have to do a little hacking to get it set up really nicely on a Unix-like system, using shared system libraries and so forth. Perl was one of the earliest free programs to try to do the work for you; you did have to go through a large and painful set of questions, but at least you didn't need a text editor and knowledge of C, make, etc. (I wonder how well cmake would work for Unicon, though my only experience with it is once building Scribus from CVS, which it did very nicely.) -- Barry.SCHWARTZ ĉe chemoelectric punkto org http://chemoelectric.org Free stuff / Senpagaj varoj: http://crudfactory.com 'Democracies don't war; democracies are peaceful countries.' - Bush (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051219-2.html)
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