Talk:Icon (programming language)

Just for historical purposes..

One of the frequent requests in the old Icon mailing list for Icon was adding regular expression support to the language. Unfortunately, I'm not sure who responded, but the best comeback to one of these requests was:

Asking for regular expressions in Icon is like asking for training wheels for a Harley

CheyenneWills 16:40, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

most modern scripting languages combine lists and tables into a single feature

I'm not aware of any evidence to support this claim.

In fact, I have never seen this ! To take the most well-known, Perl, Python, Ruby don't do this ! 213.244.14.206 14:56, 19 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Lua does this, but I can't think of any others that do. 72.146.170.188 (talk) 20:25, 4 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

REXX does this as well. REXX's stem variables are used to handle both associative arrays (tables) and lists (numerical indexed arrays). The underlying implementation just treats them as the same type of "object" and the whole concept of using stem variables to handle lists is just an accepted common REXX programming convention. CheyenneWills (talk) 16:39, 26 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Do anybody know what is the license on Icon implementation and IPL? I have found no trace of license on their website. 83.246.135.39 (talk) 10:49, 31 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The base source of Icon is in the public domain (as per the README file in the source tar file). Included with the base source are two sub-directories that have some licensed code, one from Microsoft in the wincap directory, the other is a copy of XPM, which is copyrighted by GROUPE BULL. Both licenses are basically AS-IS licenses, allowing redistribution of the source. Both sets of sources are only utilized if creating the graphics version of Icon. Within the Icon Program Library, most of the source is public domain, there are a few source files that are copyrighted, or have included copyrighted code. CheyenneWills (talk) 00:59, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The search example is a bit unfair about the verbosity of other languages. The example could be written as

char *s = "All the world's a stage. And all the men and women merely players";
int i = 0;
while ( -1 != ( i = indexOf("the",s,i)) )    write(i++);