Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Object Icon updates

There are  Version 2.5 updates to three topics at the code.google Object Icon wiki.
These are
  1. co-expressions
  2. built-in functions
  3. implementation notes
Btw, for my Cygwin build I needed to alias gawk as awk with an s-link and it happened that I had to start xwin with
/usr/bin/startxwin -- -nolock
due to some update glitch with Cygwin.
A run of
make test
gave one error which is likely a Cygwin issue on file permissions.

The Icon Visual Interface Builder, ivib, ran fine and my own test app tested OK. Remember to have at least one button with an event that you can code as exit().

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Object Icon co-expressions: name, succeed, fail and fate

Robert Parlett has released Object Icon 2.4 as an O-O UNICODE implementation of the Icon programming language.

But another Objecticon is also appearing as the trademark of an unrelated dot com.

This is sad, given the much earlier choice of Unicon for extended-Icon.

Was ICON a sorrier name choice than SNOBOL ?

IconOO appears to be available: "Icon-Oh-Oh" ?

IconCR (as in Icon co-routines) also appears to be a trademark (Eye-Conquer.)

What remains is the sobering reality that UNICODE came to so many advanced languages so late.  How and why and where did "innovation" fail to occur in this area?

Then there is Curl from www.curl.com which was UNICODE from the start and never got a foothold.  And failed to protect its MIT trademark ...

Is it possible for "Object Icon" to be protected?