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000108_icon-group-sender _Wed May 17 16:25:44 2000.msg
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by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id QAA19236
for icon-group-addresses; Wed, 17 May 2000 16:25:36 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200005172325.QAA19236@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
From: "Ian Trudel" <ian.trudel@tr.cgocable.ca>
To: "icon-group" <icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU>
Subject: Re: Is Anyone Working On A Unicode Version Of Icon?
Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 17:29:12 -0400
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Thanks for the enlightement, I was not aware of this. "The Implementation Of
The Icon Programming Language" book says:
"The first implementation of Icon (Griswold and Hanson 1979) was written in
RatFor, a preprocessor for Fortran that supports structured programming
features (Kernighan 1975).", p.6.
regards,
Ian Trudel, aka BackOrder
StarTrip Server Administrator
http://startrip.gene6.com/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Cary Coutant" <cary@cup.hp.com>
To: "Steve Wampler" <swampler@noao.edu>; "icon-group"
<icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 1:49 PM
Subject: Re: Is Anyone Working On A Unicode Version Of Icon?
> >Just for historical accuracy...
> >
> >1979 is the first C implemenation of Icon (done by Cary Coutant and me) -
> >the first implementation of Icon (an amazing beast written in FORTRAN
that
> >producing FORTRAN (really RatFor) executables) was several years old by
> >that time. Also, the C implementation was done on a PDP 11/70, with
> >its 64K address space - so some of the implementation decisions were
driven
> >by considerations that are no longer relevant!
> >
> >Cary produced a compiler for Icon at the same time, but there was
> >surprisingly
> >little improvement over the interpreter because Icon spends most of its
time
> >in the run-time system, which is already compiled code. It wasn't until
> >later
> >that Ken Walker's work produced a more efficient optimizing compiler.
>
> To clarify a bit more, the first implementation we did in 1979 was sort
> of a compiler. The icon translator still generated the "u-code" -- our
> intermediate representation -- and the icon linker then generated a
> single, large, PDP-11 assembly-language source file. This file was then
> assembled and linked against the large Icon runtime library to produce a
> native executable. The assembly code was really little more than calls to
> the runtime system, and was a very straightforward and simple translation
> of the Icon intermediate code.
>
> The problem with this approach was that the runtime library was so huge
> that link times were large even for a simple "hello, world" program.
>
> Around 1981, I think, I spent a week modifying the Icon linker to produce
> the Icon byte code instead of PDP-11 assembly language, and then built a
> small interpreter, linked to the runtime system. Now, the Icon linker
> needed only to produce a small bytecode file that could be read and
> interpreted by "iconx." The result was greatly improved compile and link
> times, very little runtime performance difference, and -- finally --
> easier portability to other Unix machines.
>
> At the time, I was just copying the idea of a bytecode interpreter from
> the Pascal p-system. Little did I realize that Sun had yet to "invent"
> bytecode!
>
> -cary
>