Icon Programming Language

Icon is an excellent, high-level, general-purpose programming language. It deserves to be (much) better known! It was created by Ralph Griswold, one of the original creators of SNOBOL4 back at Bell Labs, and embodies many of the same concepts but in a "structured" and more modern-looking framework. It also has quite a number of interesting new features that SNOBOL4 doesn't have (unfortunately, it also lacks a few very nice features that SNOBOL4 has). The language is especially well-suited to problems in information structures, combinatorial problems, and complex problems which often lead to convoluted solutions in other languages.

There are a number of good sites on the Web with information about Icon, so I won't attempt to duplicate them here. Instead, I'll encourage you to visit them and learn a little bit about the language. Note that Icon is completely in the public domain, and is all but totally machine-independent, so you can probably get a version for almost any imaginable type of computer system you have available and would like to run it on.

University of Arizona Icon Group - "the horse's mouth", as it were. From this link you can download complete copies of Icon for essentially all platforms.

There is also a very good beginners' introduction and tutorial to Icon available at another site.

T-shirts available

Some years ago, for my computer consulting booth at a computer show in England, I had a very small number of Icon T-shirts made. They are silver grey color with the (version 1, as shown above) book cover design on the front, and are a very high-quality shirt. If you're interested, they are $14.00 each plus $2.00 shipping (in the USA, inquire for overseas). There are a very limited number of these shirts in the world, so they are very much a collector's item. E-mail me if you're interested in having one of your very own!

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