ici - a modified version of Tim Long's ICI interpreter

This is a modified version of the ICI programming language interpreter, originally written by Tim Long and worked on by myself and others over a number of decades.

ICI is a general purpose interpretive programming language that has dynamic typing and flexible data types with the flow control constructs and operators of C.

It is designed for use in many environments, including embedded systems, as an adjunct to other programs, as a text-based interface to compiled libraries, and as a cross-platform scripting language with good string-handling capabilities.

ICI was first made available in the early 1990s with the original implementation being in C. ICI was donated to the public domain. Given their some supericial simalarities it probably should be noted that ICI predates Javascript.

At that time ICI had a number of users and formed the basis for a number of graphics oriented systems, most notably Canon's OpenPage graphics langugage.

This version of ICI has been converted use C++ and modifies and extends the language in a number of ways. It is distributed under an MIT license.

Changes from the previous ICI

The major changes compared to previous versions include,

• some language keywords and standard function names changed
• new types for numeric programming
• useful extension modules made standard, e.g. networking
• adds a simple REPL

Keywords and functions

To further distance ICI from its C inspired heritage several keywords have been changed. For instances, the previous struct type is now called map, mimicing C++ to a degree atop ICI's generic dictionary type. Further details are in the CHANGES file.

The keyword changes technically makes this version of ICI a different language - ICI programs that worked with the previous C-implemented interpreter are no longer valid. Sorry. However, conversion can be automated, its just naming, but I haven't done that. To be fair I had previously called this version anici (pronouced anarchy) and had it use different file name extensions and naming but went back to ici.

Since ICI development has been largely dormant for the past decade I don't feel the changes to the language are a bad thing. The re-casting of the interpreter as a C++ program is a major change and its a good time to make other changes (ignoring the argument about if they should be made at all :))

New types

Two types, vec32f and vec64f, have been added to provide for more efficient numeric programming. A vec32f is a, C, array of single- precision floating point values and a vec64f an array of double precision values. Vecs act as variable sized arrays of up to a defined capacity and support the basic arithmetic operators and assignment operators - +, -, *, /, +=, -=, *=, / - with both vec and scalar operands. Assignment operators are optimised to avoid copying data while binary operators create new values of the appropriate vec type.

On systems with Intel's IPP libraries the different operations can use the IPP functions for their implementation with a corresponding "ipp" module providing access to other functions provided by IPP.

Standard modules

The sys, net and channel modules used with previous version of ICI are now builtin to the interpreter. This adds more complete UNIX system call support, networking and channel-based inter-thread comms. Object serialization, the save() and restore() functions from my previous anici project, is now a standard language feature, defined as a basic function of ICI types.

Conversion to C++

The file doc/CPLUSPLUS.md documents the C++ conversion and language keyword changes.

Building

See doc/BUILDING.md for details on how to build.

Documentation

MOST DOCUMENTATION HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED. THE PDF IS OUT OF DATE AND I CAN"T CONVERT THE FRAMEMAKER FILE.

The majority of the documentation under the doc directory is for an older version of ICI. While the fundamentals of the language have not changed some of the detail has, e.g. the struct type is now called map. Also newer functions and types are not documented. Careful reading of the CHANGES file is one suggested work-around.

The file doc/html/ici.html has had the name changes applied and is a good starting point to learn about the language.

Why?

The fundamental issue with the documentation is extracting it from the FrameMaker .fm files! Even getting a .mif file would be better than the .fm files.