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000030_icon-group-sender_Mon Mar 10 16:38:50 2003.msg
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Received: (from root@localhost)
by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id h2ANcbQ25631
for icon-group-addresses; Mon, 10 Mar 2003 16:38:37 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200303102338.h2ANcbQ25631@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
X-Sender: whm@mail.mse.com (Unverified)
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 15:01:59 -0700
To: "Majorinc, Kazimir" <Kazimir@chem.pmf.hr>
From: "William H. Mitchell" <whm86@mse.com>
Subject: Re: Do you think Icon is good choice for me?
Cc: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: RO
I was involved with the Icon Project for nine years and I've been writing
Icon programs for over twenty years. My personal experience is that the
core language is rock solid. It sounds like Icon would be a great fit for
your application.
It is the case that there's no debugger but between tracing and the Image
procedure in the IPL, it's usually not too hard to track down bugs.
The contributed material in the IPL varies in quality but there's a lot of
useful stuff in there.
The C implementation of Icon, which is the basis of Clint Jeffery's Windows
version, was originally developed on a PDP-11 with 64k each of instruction
and data space and it's very efficient both in terms of speed and space.
There are no fundamental limitations on the size of anything until you
reach the gigabyte range but the default limit for the main interpreter
stack is set pretty low -- 10,000 words. I use a setting of 100000. (See
page 318 in the book, re MSTKSIZE.)
The Icon homepage has a lot of links to good resources but in case you
might find something useful in them, here's a link to a set of slides that
I've written for a 400-level class on Icon that I'm teaching this semester:
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs451/icon.pdf. (Some versions of the
Acrobat plug-in blow up with that WordPerfect-generated PDF file. If you
have trouble with it in your browser you can just download the whole document.)
William Mitchell
Mitchell Software Engineering
www.mse.com