Lambda the Ultimate

Icon has always impressed me as the most elegant and useful string processing language. In fact, I still use it. The speed impresses me to this day. Lately the out-of-print Implementation of the Icon Programming Language book went online as a PDF download. Not only that, the copyright is public domain.

The successor language Unicon has published the first issue of The Generator, a journal devoted to that language. Unicon is an open-source project. Therefore code from the Icon implementation book lives in Unicon's public code repository. What Unicon adds to Icon is OO, POSIX, and other goodies.

My own plea is for language folks to study (Un-)Icon's string scanning mechanisms. How I wish they were more common. No matter what my task or language du jour, I always find myself longing for Icon when it comes to strings. Doug Bagley offers some OCaml libraries which imitate Icon string techniques.

CMU Common Lisp's compiler, known as Python, has a sophisticated implementation of Common Lisp's powerful type system. The system primarily enforces type safety at runtime, but it also performs static type inference. The static type information is used to detect type errors, eliminate unnecessary runtime type checks, and select efficient primitive code (e.g. avoid excessively generic arithmetic).

CMUCL's history stretches back around twenty years, though I believe the compiler was rewritten "just" 15 odd years ago. The system is still widely used, notably by ITA software as publicised by Paul Graham.