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000060_icon-group-sender _Tue Dec 3 12:04:32 1996.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 12:27:39 MST
Message-Id: <s2a41710.071@housmtp.oceaneering.com>
X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 4.1
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 1996 12:04:32 -0600
From: Charlie Hethcoat <CHETHCOA@oss.oceaneering.com>
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Subject: Icon vs. Java
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
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Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
The question of using Icon in preference to Perl for CGI
programming has come up periodically, and Icon, based on what I
have seen, acquits itself well for that application. Now Java has
arrived. The reason I write this is to provoke some feedback from the
Icon community about whether Icon couldn't profitably be used for the
same types of jobs as Java, maybe with some extensions to the runtime
system. Icon has always had a portable runtime interpreter, after
all.
The portable runtime interpreter based on an abstraction of a
computer is the classic software approach to object-code
portability. When the many eight-bit MPU chips appeared in the
mid-70's, it seemed for a while that the UCSD Pascal system (based on
the Pascal P interpreter of Niklaus Wirth) was the smart way to give
everyone in the world the same programming language to play with.
Eventually, of course, the 8086 CPU and the IBM PC came out, and the
interpreter-based systems came to be considered as beneath contempt.
Who needed portability? Everyone had a PC and wanted speed.
Portability was not too important, and such as it was, was at the
source code level.
Now, with the Internet, interpreter systems are back in the
name of portability of object code. Suddenly the Intel CPU is
not the only game in town, and code has to run--unchanged--on multiple
CPU architectures all over the world. Recompiling is not the answer;
the Java runtime interpreter, which combines abstractions of both the
computer and the network, is seen as the solution.
So my questions are: what extensions would be required to give
Icon the same characteristics as Java for the purpose of
writing Web browser "applets"? How easily could an Icon "plug-in" for
Web browsers be to create? Could a typical Web browser (e. g.
Netscape) accept an Icon interpreter plug-in? Is anyone considering
doing this? (I ask, of course, because I have not a clue about how to
do it myself.)
Charlie Hethcoat