The Unicon programming language was created by Clint Jeffery, along with Shamim Mohamed, Jafar Al Gharaibeh, and Robert Parlett.
Unicon was built to extend the Icon programming language with a new language, built upon its foundations. The name Unicon stands for "Unified Extended Dialect of Icon."
The goals of the developers were to create a new language that was high-level and object-oriented, network and graphics savvy, and to have goal-direction and backtracking. Unicon aims to be a very high-level language, making it expressive and concise. In that, its syntax resembles Pascal or C, to some extent. Unicon is equipped with features for handling networks and graphics, which makes it suitable for solving complex problems that involve these domains. Inspired by Icon, Unicon retains the features of goal-direction and backtracking, which allows programmers to express solutions in a declarative manner, making it easier to tackle intricate tasks.
While the strongest influences on the language came from Icon, it emerged as a merger of three popular Icon extensions: IDOL (Icon's Object-Oriented Preprocessor, POSIX Filesystem and Networking Interface, and ODBC Facility. IDOL introduced object-oriented capabilities to Icon, laying the groundwork for Unicon's object-oriented support. Unicon inherited a robust filesystem and networking interface from POSIX, and the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) facility enhanced the language's interaction capabilities.
Compared to Icon, Unicon offers better access to the operating system and extends Icon's capabilities. Its object-oriented features and improved system interaction set it apart.
Its strengths and applications include rapid problem solving, largely due to its expressive syntax and backtracking, and its built-in support for graphics and network simplifies graphics and networking development, while its readability and high-level constructs make it a suitable language for teaching programming concepts.
I was unable to determine when the language was first released, but Unicon gained prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s and is available as an open-source project covered by a GNU General Public License. It continues to be actively maintained, with an update in October of 2023, as of this writing. This release was for Windows, and included bundled tools like Ulex and IYACC for use with the "Build Your Own Programming Language" (BYOPL) project. The book Build Your Own Programming Language features Unicon as a case study.
The official Unicon programming book in PDF format is a good way to learn Unicon. The book introduces object-oriented development as well as UML, and the use of Unicon for CGI.
In this section of our guide to computer program languages, we are focusing on the Unicon programming language. Online resources for the language, such as official Unicon websites, repositories, tutorials, IDEs, and other tools or utilities designed to facilitate programming in Unicon, as well as developer community websites, forums, or reviews.
Recommended Resources
Build Your Own Programming Language
Hosted on GitHub, the book by Clinton L. Jeffery provides a comprehensive guide for creating your own programming language, using the Unicon programming language as a reference point. The book may be purchased in published form, and it may be viewed here for free, under the MIT License. A resource for developers seeking to build their own language, the book covers language frontends, syntax tree traversals, and code generation and runtime systems, along with several sub-topics.
https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Build-Your-Own-Programming-Language/
Drones: The Posix Interface for the Unicon Programming Language
Prepared by Shamim Mohamed, one of the developers of Unicon, the features of the Icon programming language is discussed, as well as the deficiencies that led to the development of the Unicon dialect, including the goals that guided its developers. Topics include signals, spawning programs, redirecting I/O streams, networking, reading directories, regular expressions, information from system files, DBM databases, and the status of the language.
http://drones.com/unicon/
GitHub is a repository for software, programming languages, and other projects, particularly those that are being developed by teams, as it allows for collaboration with the development team and others. This is the GitHub repository for the Unicon programming language, which includes two repositories: Unicon and Unicon Technical Reports. Available through a GNU General Public License, the language's source code, program files, documentation, and other files related to Unicon are available.
https://github.com/uniconproject/
Unicon is a unification of several extended dialects of the Icon language, including Icon plus classes, POSIX system facilities, GDBM, and ODBC-based database access, packages, 3D graphics, and other featured, including IDOL, an object-oriented Icon preprocessor, and MTIcon, a multi-threading Icon. An introduction to the language is offered, along with external links and references, such as to books, articles, programming references, and related variants of the language.
https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Unicon
Hosted on SourceForge, Junicon is a Java-based interpreter for the Unicon programming language, which uses program transformation to translate Unicon into another scripting language, Groovy, which runs under Java, the result being a transformational interpreter for goal-directed evaluation that is portable and has access to the full range of Java facilities for concurrency and graphics. A project summary, downloads, release notes, and documentation is featured.
http://junicon.sourceforge.net/
SourceForge: The Unicon Project
Unicon is a very high-level object-oriented network- and graphics-savvy programming language, with a syntax similar to that of Pascal or C. Its files and source may be freely downloaded under a GNU General Public License. Its features are listed here, along with project samples, project activity, and development notes, project trackers, mailing lists, and a project discussion forum. Project members are acknowledged, and feature requests and bug reports may be made online.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/unicon/
SourceForge: Unicon Programming
Created by Clinton Jeffery, Shamim Mohamed, Jafar Al Gharaibeh, Ray Pereda, and Robert Parlett, Unicon is a dialect of the Icon programming language, extending it by adding classes, a POSIX layer, networking, and other productivity features. Documentation for the language is presented here, along with development notes, license data, blog posts, and other information. Its files may be freely downloaded from SourceForge under a GNU General Public License.
http://btiffin.users.sourceforge.net/up/
The Unified Extended Dialect of Icon (Unicon) is a high-level, goal-directed, object-oriented, general-purpose applications language that is freely available under a GNU General Public License. New developments in the language are noted, along with technical reports, mailing lists, testimonies, and links to other resources for the language. Features may be requested, and bugs may be reported. Other resources include a developer directory and a book list.
http://www.unicon.org/
