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000013_icon-group-sender _Wed May 17 09:34:16 2000.msg
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by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id JAA04298
for icon-group-addresses; Wed, 17 May 2000 09:33:54 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200005171633.JAA04298@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 08:01:08 -0700
From: Steve Wampler <swampler@noao.edu>
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To: icon-group <icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU>
Subject: Re: Is Anyone Working On A Unicode Version Of Icon?
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Status: RO
Content-Length: 1225
Ian Trudel wrote:
> Actually, we should not forget one thing about Icon. Even though Icon looks
> to my eye pretty young, fresh and complete, the fact is the first
> implementation was made in 1979! I'm not sure when the C implemention has
> started, but it's sure old. Most concepts of Icon implementation just rocks,
> but it doesn't mean these are using the newer and better techniques.
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.
--
Steve Wampler- SOLIS Project, National Solar Observatory
swampler@noao.edu