Unicon (programming language)

Unicon is a programming language designed by the American computer scientist Clint Jeffery together with collaborators including Shamim Mohamed, Jafar Al Gharaibeh and Robert Parlett. It descends from Icon and from Idol, a preprocessor that added object orientation to Icon, and its name is short for Unified Extended Dialect of Icon. Unicon began as a merger of three popular Icon extensions: Idol, a POSIX filesystem and networking interface, and an ODBC database facility. Compared with Icon it gives better access to the operating system and supports object-oriented programming, with classes, packages and multiple inheritance with novel semantics. Rather than exposing low-level C interfaces, it offers higher-level facilities for graphics and networking, plus dynamic loading of C modules, dbm files used as associative arrays, 3D graphics, monitoring of child programs and true concurrency on platforms with POSIX threads. It is not yet Unicode-compliant.