Lambda the Ultimate

inactiveTopic The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language
started 10/4/2002; 2:37:28 PM - last post 10/5/2002; 10:43:02 AM
Ehud Lamm - The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language  blueArrow
10/4/2002; 2:37:28 PM (reads: 1798, responses: 2)
The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language
The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language. Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold Princeton University Press, 1986 ISBN 0-691-08431-9, out of print.

Great news from the LtU DG.

I've been wanting to read this book for a long time.

Icon has some interesting control structures (e.g., generators and goal directed evaluation). The original implementation, as far as I know, was done by translation into VM instructions (at least, that's the original implementation I used...)


Posted to implementation by Ehud Lamm on 10/4/02; 2:39:34 PM

Ehud Lamm - Re: The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language  blueArrow
10/5/2002; 4:13:10 AM (reads: 626, responses: 1)
If you find this interesting, you may also want to check out the papers mentioned here. The gde paper is quite nice.

Ehud Lamm - Re: The Implementation of the Icon Programming Language  blueArrow
10/5/2002; 10:43:02 AM (reads: 648, responses: 0)
An useful perspective on Icon, Snobol and even early versions of Perl is to view them as DSLs for string processig. Compared to regular string processing in imperative languages, the facilities these languages provide (e.g., backtracking) are very useful.

I wonder how important such features would be in a (lazy) functional language. It seems most of these features can be implemented in such languages, without the need for a specialized DSL.