Set operators (++, --, **) now work on tables. Semantics are based on the tables' keys. The irony should not be lost on the former UArizona graduate students who implemented the set data type in the first place. Sets were added by adapting the table type to use only its keys and not their associated values.
Unicon Technical Report #20 documents a new JSON library for Unicon.
Using Unicon ODBC on Windows 10? With some Windows versions and updates, it has been difficult to view/configure legacy drivers using the current Windows ODBC configurator. Maybe this has been fixed in newest versions, but for example, there can be issues on 64-bit Windows when using 32-bit ODBC software. If you are having trouble configuring ODBC drivers and such, you may want to check out C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe. For some ODBC drivers, at least, this tool let's you configure your driver and data source names.
Support for true concurrent threads is now in the sources and binary distributions. Threads' default heap sizes dynamically adjust based on available memory, improving performance and scalability. To enable in your own builds, make sure you have pthreads libraries and headers, and add #define Concurrent 1 to src/h/define.h. A Unicon TR on threads is posted on the technical reports list. Comments and bug reports are welcome.
A function array(i,x) works like list(), except for arrays of integers or arrays of reals, it will save a lot of space.
Nolan Clayton provided logos for use in websites and applications. Thanks, Nolan!
For a brief period, there was a periodical called The Generator, the brain-child of Kazimir Majorinc. Thanks Kazimir!
The Unicon FAQ was recently updated. Jovana Milutinovich was kind enough to translate it into Serbian.
Hugh Sasse has revamped our Help Wanted page. Thanks, Hugh!
Jafar Al Gharaibeh has created a Facebook page for us.
Jon Pearkins at one point created http://RalphGriswold.com to help us remember Ralph E. Griswold.
Sudarshan Gaikaiwari has developed a proposed SNOBOL-style Pattern data type for Unicon. His Thesis is available for public comment, and the code is in the Unicon CVS (not turned on by default, yet). Some feedback received leads us to expect substantial revision will occur before this feature becomes part of the language standard, but it does offer promising concise notation and faster performance than string scanning.
The new Ivib 2 and gui package are the default Ivib tool; Ivib 1 is still available but is no longer built by default. Thanks to Robert Parlett, Ivib 2 is pretty good at migrating GUI dialogs and offers numerous technical advantages.
The first issue of The Generator, an international journal devoted to Unicon and Icon, is available.
The Unicon CVS sources now support Mac OS X, including X11 graphics if they are available.
Unicon Version 11 features numerous goodies such as 3D facilities, JPEG, LIBZ, gzip'ed executables, autoconf. A preliminary version of most of this code for Linux is now in the CVS repository. Naomi Martinez, Katie Ray, Yonggang Lu, and Xuhua Zhang contributed to Unicon Version 11.
Naomi Martinez has written a set of 3D graphics facilities for Unicon on top of OpenGL. Her report is Unicon TR #9 and her facilities are also described in a new chapter in the Unicon book. Modest additions will be made to the 3D facilities as we gain experience with them.
Tom Foster provided design suggestions and images that are responsible for this page's new look.
Katie Ray has written Ulex, a lexical analyzer generator for Unicon and Icon. It is in the CVS repository and will become part of future Unicon source distributions. Unicon TR #2a describes it.
Unicon is going GNU! We are taking steps to become a GNU project. The Unicon book is copylefted and "freed" in the Free Software Foundation spirit; OpenOffice 1.1 source for this document is now available.
The NT GCC console binaries use the traditional names icont and iconx and support graphics facilities. Separate wicon* binaries are provided for GUI applications that do not use a console (and do not want one popping up if they are launched from an Icon or menu).
Thanks to an insight gained while working on UFO, the Unicon-FORMAN hybrid, we have merged the execution monitoring facilities into the main production VM without hurting performance. This simplifies the Unicon build process per your user requests, and brings us another step toward the day when an automatic debugging suite is part of the regular Unicon distribution.
The link option -B bundles iconx and icode together to form a standalone executable. This has been a default on Windows, but will now be available on most other platforms.
"Field Table Compression" is not entirely new, but after a dose of debugging, it is time to reintroduce it as a default under Unicon. Field Table Compression dramatically reduces the icode size of any program that uses a lot of record types, most notably GUI and OO programs. The crucial fix was provided by outstanding graduate student Vince Ho of UNLV.
.DLL access via the Icon standard loadfunc() facility will be available in the next Windows release. You will be able to write C language extensions that will run on both UNIX and Windows. The suggestion on how to do this was made by Internet volunteer David Feustel.
Work is well underway to implement operator overloading. Internet volunteer Charles Evans is working on this.
Internet volunteer David Feustel has developed support for small executables under Windows via a stub executable that invokes an nticonx.dll/wiconx.dll. We hope to introduce this feature as the default behavior in the next Windows Unicon distribution build.
Selection/clipboard support has been added to the graphics facilities; the change should be visible in the source distribution at this point. WAttrib("selection") reads the (text-only) contents of the X11 selection or MS Windows clipboard; WAttrib("selection="||s) sets it to string s. This allows Unicon programs to copy/cut/paste data from other programs on the desktop.
We have ported Steve Lumos' messaging facilities to Windows, and Federico Balbi's ODBC interface to UNIX (Solaris/Linux) platforms. Our least common denominator is becoming less common!
Warnings when you assign (and thereby wipe out) a built-in function are now issued; we need to omit the warning for declared locals.
Unicon has selected the GNU Public License for our language translation tools. Our class libraries will be under GNU-lite.
The icont translator now generates a single .u file instead of .u1/.u2 files, saving huge space on the Icon program library modules. The linker still accepts .u1/.u2 files. We will explore additional ways to make ucode and icode more compact.