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.

• Icon: home page - books

• A personal collection of libraries (pcl), see separate documentation
• Language tools (see icon-tools):
  • IconDoc - a documentation generator for Icon
  • #IconTags - generate tags file for Icon code
• Notes/examples (see icon-examples):
  • Graphics - some graphics libraries
  • Vidgets - GUI programming in Icon
• Advent of Code - with descriptions of some Icon solutions

Requirements

• pcl libraries

Install

• download the latest release of icon-tools
• compile the code in "icontags" with "icont" (tested using Icon 9.5.1), e.g.:

  > icont icontags.icn
  

• place "icontags.icx" somewhere on your PATH

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

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:

• help files - see :help icon-pcl
  • language reference - from the Programming in Icon book
  • ipl-libs - documentation for the Icon Program Library (selected)
  • pcl-libs - documentation for my own libraries
• highlighting - the built-in highlighter works well
• indentation - the built-in indenter does not work well (in progress)
• tags - use #IconTags to create tags file for Icon code

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

• "~/vimfiles/pack/plugins/start/icon-pcl.vim"

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

:helptags ALL

and look at the documentation, starting with:

:help icon-pcl