Talk:Io (programming language)

Name origin

Does anyone know how Io got its name? Is it from input/output? From the daughter of Inachus in Greek mythology? From the moon of Jupiter? From the Hawaiian species of hawk? Some kind of pictorial representation? Or just out of the air? I'm curious. Deco 23:00, 13 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is answered in the FAQ. --Graue 23:18, 21 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

And the answer is: out of the air. The short name represents the language's simplicity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by IanOsgood (talk • contribs) 2007-07-07 15:48:21 (UTC)

Yes, he wanted the name to be simple, so he started trying two letter combinations, and Io was the first one that he liked.

Original IO langauge

There is an earlier computer language named IO. Steve Dekorte: "The earlier Io turned out to be an interesting language based on continuations and written by Raph Levien. Since then, Martin Sandin has written an implementation of Raph's language called Amalthea." This language was used in Raphael Finkel's book Advanced Programming Language Design. — Preceding unsigned comment added by IanOsgood (talk • contribs) 2007-07-07 15:53:25 (UTC)

Efficiency?

"Remarkable features of Io are its efficiency, minimal size and openness to using external code resources. Io is executed by a small, portable virtual machine" - I assume the article means in terms of programmer time. This is unclear and if these results are anything to go by; (the author states that the benchmarks are very unscientific) then io is not very efficient in terms of actual calculation/cpu time 129.78.64.102

That page is probably not anything to go by: the author makes it clear that he tried not to optimize the program for each language.

See the Io homepage's speed section for a counterpoint (again, though, it's not scientific). —Piet Delport 2007-08-07 06:53