Talk:Io (programming language)

Computer science Start‑class Low‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computer science, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Computer science related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Computer scienceWikipedia:WikiProject Computer scienceTemplate:WikiProject Computer scienceComputer science

Start

This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

Low

This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Things you can help WikiProject Computer science with:

Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Article requests :
- Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences/Computer science, computing, and Internet
Cleanup :
- Computer science articles needing attention
- Computer science articles needing expert attention
Copyedit :
- Computing
Expand :
- Computer science
Infobox :
- Computer science articles without infoboxes
Maintain :
- Timeline of computing 2020–present
Photo :
- Find pictures for the biographies of computer scientists (see List of computer scientists)
- Computing articles needing images
Stubs :
- Computer science stubs
Unreferenced :
- WikiProject Computer science/Unreferenced BLPs
Project-related :
- Tag all relevant articles in Category:Computer science and sub-categories with {{WikiProject Computer science}}

This page was proposed for deletion by an editor in the past.

Template:Findsourcesnotice

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

Yes, he wanted the name to be simple, so he started trying two letter combinations, and Io was the first one that he liked. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gmh33 (talk • contribs) 12:51, August 30, 2007 (UTC)

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

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

Everything is what?

The article says that in Io "everything is an object" and then "everything is a message". Could it be these are two different everythings? In the given example System version "System" is probably an object, not a message; and "System version" is a message whose return value/reply is another object? Or is "System" also a message, to the universe? --2.247.241.196 (talk) 17:32, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It would be better to say that every "thing" is an object, and every action is performed via message passing. For example, while Java has objects and messages, things like numbers aren't objects in Java (they are in Io) and actions like addition are not messages (but they are in Io). --Steve Dekorte