Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!agate!bionet!ig!arizona!gudeman
From: gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: The paradigm of Icon
Message-ID: <8611@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 9 Jan 89 03:22:39 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 35

In article  <2630@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I ... define a procedural language as one in which all modules have
>a parent-child relationship with each other.

That strikes me as a peculiar definition.  One could rule out any
language with a goto.  Each to his own, but it would help if you would
make such non-standard definitions clear earlier in a discussion.

> I also don't classify languages
>by implementation details... for example, SmallTalk uses messages to pass
>data between procedures, but since they generally have a parent-child
>relationship (one calls the other) they're still procedures.

Actually, I suspect that SmallTalk is implemented with procedure
calls.  The important thing is that it encourages the programmer to
think of programming as the creation of objects and to think of
computation as the interaction of objects, so it is called an
object-oriented language.

>Icon uses
>a stack to pass a stream of data between concurrently executing modules.
>They have a source/drain relationship. It's non-procedural.

Since Icon doesn't have Modula-style modules can I assume you are
using the term generically and mean ``expressions''?  Also, Icon
doesn't have streams or concurency (or anything much like concurency),
so I'm having trouble visualizing anything in Icon that fits this
description, can you give an example?  Maybe it would help if you
defined your terms.
					David Gudeman

					    Department of Computer Science
gudeman@arizona.edu			    Gould-Simpson Science Building
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