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000095_icon-group-sender _Wed Nov 29 18:24:22 1995.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Wed, 29 Nov 1995 16:21:21 MST
From: "Richard L. Goerwitz III" <richard@mithra-orinst.uchicago.edu>
Message-Id: <199511300024.SAA00789@typo.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: Another introductory book on Icon?
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 18:24:22 -0600 (CST)
In-Reply-To: <199511290804.BAA12313@usr4.primenet.com> from "William H. Mitchell" at Nov 29, 95 01:04:23 am
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> I've come to believe that another Icon book would be of use to the
> programming community.
If you write an Icon book, be sure you have the question of future
support nailed down.
If you start writing today, it will doubtless be at least 1.5 years
before you are in the bookstores, so the lifetime of the language
is a concern. Ralph has retired, and most of the former Icon Pro-
ject members have since moved on to other things. The language, as
such, may not even be around five years from now, except as a legacy
system.
Then again, some research group might pick it up (or pick up some
streamlined version of it) and revitalize it. Ralph was very good
about user support, though, and I have to wonder how another acad-
emic research group could even come close to what he and his cohorts
did from the mid 70s up until the early 90s.
Maybe some of the old hands might want to comment. I have to con-
fess that the last major project I did in Icon was several years
ago. Now I pretty much do everything with shell scripts and C.
A derivative language might be nice, because it could fix a lot of
old bugs that it is too late to fix now (e.g., the random number
generator, the way generation of table elements is done, etc.). But
with grants drying up for language research, how could anyone short
of a Linus or Larry take this on?
--
-Richard L. Goerwitz *** *** r-goerwitz@uchicago.edu