Atari Mega Archive 1/Atari Mega Archive - Volume 1.iso/language/icon8_fx.zoo/read.me

Text File | 1991-04-16 | 5KB | 93 lines

General
-------

   "Icon is a high-level programming language with extensive facilities
for processing strings and structures."  It was created as a result
of an ongoing project, headed by Ralph E. Griswold, in Department of
Computer Science, The University of Arizona.

Icon Version 8 which you can find in directory languages in atari.archive
comes straight from cs.arizona.edu.  Unfortunatly this implementation
is not really usable due to, both, some bugs in the original code
and deficiences in libraries for the compiler used in this project
(some version of Lattice C).

In particular, system() function does not work killing a possibility
using idol, EOF is not detected correctly creating infinite loops
when reading from stdin (Lattice C expects to see ^Z), stdin is
echoed without asking on stdout, ICONPATH does not work, big numbers
are not working.... some other stuff.

This archive contains diffs and makefiles which make possible to compile
a better version using gcc compiler.  Apply these diffs with patch.ttp,
copy makefiles to appriopriate directories,  hit make and relax.
This will work if your library function HeapAlloc from sbrk.c is
fixed to return memory always on an even boundary.  If it does not,
better fix it immediately (add 1 to a requested amount and & this
with (-2)).

If you are using an old version of PML library then some functions
has to be switched for correct and/or better replacements.  You
may either fix your libraries (i.e. recompile with -c option supplied
sources and substitute resulting .o files in your old library with
a help of gcc-ar.ttp), or you may just add these sources to your
makefile and link resulting objects in front of your pml.olb library.

If you do not wish to be bothered by all of this you may find alredy
fixed and recompiled Icon Version 8 in directory Binaries in
atari.archive and also in all other places which are archiving
postings to comp.binaries.atari.st.  Both Icon Version 8 and Idol
which works with it were posted in this newsgroup.

Here is a quote from read.me file in binaries posting.

This implementation follows description in "The Icon Programming Language -
The Second Edition" by Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold,
Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-447889-4 with the following differences:
-- An option -x to icont for directly running iconx from a compilation
   stage is not implemented; use shell scripts, aliases or makefiles
   to achieve similar effects.
-- There is no support for pipes.
-- Redirection of stderr to a named file (-e option to iconx) is OK, but
   '-e -' (redirection of stderr to stdout) is not supported.
-- An option -t to iconx turns on tracing, even if Icon program was
   not compiled with -t option.
-- In Icon sources both slash and backslash can be used as path separators;
   (this implies that slash is excluded as a valid character from acceptable
   file names; also you cannot use slash in filename strings passed to
   system(), since your shell may not support 'slash convention').
-- system() function used in these binaries was extensively tested with
   gulam and also quite well with msh, i.e. shell from MWC compiler package
   (don't use gulam and msh together!); it is expected to work with other
   shells as well, but I cannot be 100% sure;  if system() does not work
   with your preferred shell your only recourse can be recompilation
   with a different library function.
-- Icon sources created with ST editors or Un*x editors ('\r\n' line
   terminator versus '\n') are equally acceptable.
-- If environment variable TEMP is defined it will be taken for a name
   of a directory used by icont for temporary work files; they can be
   quite large so it is a good idea to have TEMP on RAM drive, if you can.

More on Icon
------------

This distribution gives only a small Icon sample.  Much more material,
including libraries of Icon procedures and programs, sources, executables
for different computers can be obtained from Icon Project.

   ftp: cs.arizona.edu (128.196.128.118) in directory icon
   bbs: [phone]
   mail orders : Icon Project, Dept of Computer Science, Gould-Simpson
      Buildind, The University of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721 USA
   ordering info: [phone], fax: [phone]

This is also a good place to send your order for The Icon Book and
other documents (MC and Visa accepted).  Ordered disks cost around
$15US per disk.  Atari specific files have names like ate.arc,
ats.arc, atl.arc (executables, sources, libraries).

   Michal Jaegermann
   [e-mail]
   [e-mail]