Unicon Language resources

Introduction

This page contains some resources for the Unicon programming language, which is an object-oriented extension of the popular Icon language, developed at the University of Arizona.

About Icon and Unicon

Icon is a programming language developed over many years by a team at the University of Arizona.

A brief introduction to Icon can be found at http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/intro.htm

Unicon adds objects to Icon, which is a procedural language. Unicon's features are documented by its creator, Dr Clint Jeffery, of the New Mexico State University. See the Unicon pages at Sourceforge http://unicon.sourceforge.net for more details.

Unicon Library Classes

I am developing as an ongoing project a set of Unicon library classes. The source code is split into several Unicon packages, as follows :-

gui - a complete set of gui classes for designing a modern UI. Features include :-

An object hierarchy providing all the standard components required to build a modern application, including trees, tables, editable text areas, and so on.
A fully featured menu system.
Easy subclassing of components to create custom components.
A ticker (timer) feature whereby arbitrary objects may have a tick method invoked at specified intervals. These methods are then scheduled between window events.
Support for modal and modeless dialogs.
Extensive built-in use of double buffering to eliminate unsightly flicker from updating displays.
Free application of Icon graphic attributes to components.

ivib - not really a library, this is a program for designing GUIs using the above classes visually, using a drag-and-drop interface. Designs are output as Unicon source code, and can be re-input for further editing. Click here for an example screen shot of Ivib.
lib - Some general library classes for the following :-

langprocs.icn - some fundamental class utilities, including functions for displaying, serializing and cloning objects.
format.icn - Formatting of numeric data.
gethttp.icn - Gets data from a server using the HTTP protocol, correctly handling retries and timeouts. Currently not working due to bugs in the Icon runtime system.
money.icn - Represents monetary values.
process.icn - A convenient class wrapper for using multiple processes using Unicon's fork. See also ipc below for inter-process communication.
qsort.icn - An implementation of quicksort.
stringbuff.icn - A class to overcome Icon's inefficiency at building up very long strings by concatenation.
time.icn - A date/time class.
url.icn - A class for representing URLs, with facilities for encoding/decoding with CGI paramters.

parser - Some classes for parsing Unicon source code, using the same preprocessor and grammar used by the compiler.
unidep - A program for creating makefile entries for a set of Unicon input files. This is a great help when creating a project from multiple source files. It ensures that each file is compiled before any of the classes it contains are referenced by any other file.
unidoc - A program to produce documentation from unicon source files, either in html or groff format. Current HTML output for the whole library is available online. Steve Wampler has done a similar program (also called Unidoc!), which is more flexible in that it can handle Icon source as well as Unicon. See the link below to Steve Wampler's page for more details.
xml - A validating XML parser and an HTML parser.
ipc - An easy-to-use interface to the Unix IPC facilities, namely semaphores, message queues and shared memory. Full documenation is here

Library API documentation

Full auto-generated API documentation for the library can be found here.

A PDF document covering the gui package can be downloaded here (about 580kB).

Download

The source code is now part of the unicon sourceforge CVS repository :-

http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=10965

Unicon major mode for Emacs

This is based on the Icon major mode. To use it, download the file unicon.el , and place it in a convenient directory; in my case /home/rpp/bin. Then add the following to your .emacs file :-

;; Add the directory with unicon.el in it to emacs' search path.
;; Change the directory as appropriate.
(setq load-path (append load-path '("/home/rpp/bin")))
(autoload 'unicon-mode "unicon")
;; Define the mode for .icn files
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.icn\\'" . unicon-mode) auto-mode-alist))
;; User setup - may be customized.
; Indentations
(setq unicon-indent-level 3)
(setq unicon-continued-statement-offset unicon-indent-level)
(setq unicon-class-indent-level unicon-indent-level)
(setq unicon-brace-offset (- unicon-indent-level))
; Spaces rather than spaces+tabs
(setq unicon-indent-use-only-spaces t)

Some other options are available. After loading, type C-h,a,unicon to see a list of available variables.

Because this file is based on the Icon major mode, it is subject to the GNU general public license: see the file COPYING

Contact

My email address is r dot parlett at zen dot co dot uk.