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000025_icon-group-sender _Mon Jul 14 20:14:16 1997.msg
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Received: from kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 12:07:31 MST
Received: by kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU (5.65v4.0/1.1.8.2/08Nov94-0446PM)
id AA03122; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 12:07:30 -0700
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Date: 14 Jul 1997 20:14:16 GMT
From: espie@triere.ens.fr (Marc Espie)
Message-Id: <5qe1ao$9pg$1@nef.ens.fr>
Organization: Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
Subject: Is comp.lang.icon still alive ?
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: RO
Sometimes I wonder. I just skimmed through >20 postings, none of which was
related to the Icon language, some 3 of them were remotely related to
computing. There was not even any of the classical mistakes of `Where can I
get this cool graphic icon editor ?'.
The FAQ hasn't been updated in ages. Were it not for the icon newsletter,
you would believe the language is dead.
So I will try and write something a little more Icon-related.
I've been working on an Icon port to the Amiga, and so has Marc Culler.
Fortunately, our parallel work have been mostly in complementary direction,
so there should be a new twin port that compiles under both SAS/C
(amiga-centric) and gcc (Unix-like close port). The main work that remains
to be done is... drum roll... the graphics part.
I've seen the Unix and Windows version taking shape. Having at least two or
three distinct ports will be a very Good Thing, as we will get the chance
to get more platform independent graphics. Right now, the control you have
on colormaps is a bit too simple, for instance. You can play with images
as long as you stay within the Palette ranges, for instance, or as long as
you don't allocate more colors than your display can handle.
Playing with digitized images is much more difficult. Maybe I haven't
looked closely enough, but it seems there is now way to ask for `the
closest color to those already in use' except for the hard-coded palettes.
Right now, I have to whip up another external graphics program to first
correct my colormap, and then to play with Icon.
I would say that colormaps are an important object in their own right, that
deserves a more thorough concept.
As another limitation, I've compiled Icon 9.3 under Amiga OpenBSD... Works
withouth a hitch, BUT my X display is rather peculiar: I only have 4 color
planes, for a grand total of 16 possibly different colors. Most icon color
programs tend to allocate more than 16 colors, and so fail abysmally on my
machine... though I'd like to get more use of it than out of a b&w machine.
Contrasting with that, other programs such as the pure amiga port of
Ghostscript manage to produce awesome color graphics with the same
limitations.
Well, enough rambling. There are probably ways to achieve better results,
and I'll certainly have to look that up by myself.
Just wanted to give all the comp.lang.icon lurkers the feeling they were
not abandonned yet :-)
--
[nosave]<http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/espie/index.html>
microsoft network is EXPLICITLY forbidden to redistribute this message.
`Seiza no matataki kazoe, uranau koi no yuku e.'
Marc Espie (Marc.Espie@ens.fr)