| Paradigm(s) | object-oriented, procedural |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Clint Jeffery |
| Influenced by | Icon |
| OS | Cross-platform: Windows, Unix |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | unicon.sourceforge.net |
Unicon is a programming language designed by American computer scientist Clint Jeffery. Unicon descended from Icon and its preprocessor, IDOL, that 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."
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.
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 XMLHttpRequest and SNOBOL-style pattern matching.
Unicon is not yet Unicode-compliant and there are opportunities posted at a help-wanted page.[1]
Contents |
procedure main() w := open("test UNICON window", "g") write( w, "testing") write( w, "Any key will close this window") read(w) close(w) end