Unicon is a programming language designed by American computer scientist Clint Jeffery with collaborators including Shamim Mohamed, Jafar Al Gharaibeh, Robert Parlett and others. Unicon descended from Icon and a preprocessor for Icon called IDOL. Compared with Icon, Unicon offers better access to the operating system as well as support for object-oriented programming. Unicon began life as a merger of three popular Icon extensions: an OO preprocessor named Idol, a POSIX filesystem and networking interface, and an ODBC facility. The name is shorthand for "Unified Extended Dialect of Icon." Features Compared with Icon, many of the new features of Unicon are extensions to the I/O and system interface, to complement Icon's core control and data structures. Rather than providing lower-level APIs as-is from C, Unicon implements higher level and easier to use facilities, enabling rapid development of graphic- and network-intensive applications in addition to Icon's core strengths in text and file processing. Feature list Classes and packages Exceptions as a contributed class library - see mailing list Loadable child programs Monitoring of child programs Dynamic loading of C modules (some platforms) Multiple inheritance, with novel semantics ODBC database access dbm files can be used as associative arrays Posix system interface 3D graphics True concurrency (on platforms supporting Posix threads) When run as a graphical IDE, the Unicon program ui.exe continues to offer links to Icon help. The official Unicon programming book in PDF format is a popular way to learn Unicon. The book includes an introduction to object-oriented development as well as UML. It includes useful chapters on topics such as the use of Unicon for CGI. Recent additions to Unicon include true concurrency. Unicode Unicon is not yet Unicode-compliant. There are opportunities posted at a help-wanted page. Example code procedure main() w := open("test UNICON window", "g") write(w, "Hello, World!") read(w) close(w) end See also Rebol, a similar web-oriented expression-based language without the use of keywords Curl, multi-paradigm web content functional language which is also expression-based but only for client-side Coroutine Generators Continuation References External links Unicon Programming book Posix Interface for Unicon ADAPTING SNOBOL-STYLE PATTERNS TO UNICON Java version of Icon Unicon at 99-bottles Literate programs Icon programming language family Pattern matching programming languages Text-oriented programming languages SNOBOL programming language family