Icon Notes

Icon is a little-known language. I encountered it first on my Atari ST in the early 1990s, and used it quite often. I even received copies of the Icon Analyst, and wrote some machine-learning algorithms in the language for my MSc. Thirty years later, and it's still a favourite language of mine.

Projects

IconTags

Requirements
Install
Basic Use

To create tags for the "icontags.icn" file, call:

> icontags icontags.icn

A sorted list of tags appears in the file "tags".

For more options:

> icontags -h
icontags: filename(s)
Writes record and procedure definition positions to a 'tags' file.

-h --help            : displays help message
-v --version         : show version
-o --output filename : output filename, defaults to 'tags'
-r --read-files      : read file list from stdin, e.g. piped from another source

Filenames can be listed on the command-line. However, on Windows, CMD does not expand wildcards into multiple files. Therefore, the flag "-r" makes icondoc read the filenames from stdin, enabling you to pipe the filenames to the program:

> dir /b *.icn | icontags -r

Setup

On Linux, I build the latest version from G.Townsend's source; when on Windows, I use Icon version 9.5.1 from the Arizona website.

For working with Vim, I use my own icon-pcl.vim package:

Install the package by git cloning or unpacking to (for example):

After installing, create the help documentation tags in vim using:

:helptags ALL

and look at the documentation, starting with:

:help icon-pcl

Page from Peter's Scrapbook, output from a VimWiki on 2024-05-18.