Unicon (programming language)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unicon is a programming language descended from Icon 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, the new features of Unicon include the following. Most of these features are extensions to the I/O and system interface, to complement Icon's outstanding core control and data structures. Rather than providing lower-level API's 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.
- 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 semantics
- ODBC database access
- dbm files can be used as associative arrays
- posix system interface
- 3D graphics
