Abstract

1 Introduction Since the design of the Icon programming language in the early 1980's, newer languages have incorporated a number of language features that have become well established. These include, among others, first-class functions and a variety of scoping mechanisms. Therefore, we are interested in extending, or changing the Icon language [Gri82][GG83] to reflect these innovations in language design. Icon is distributed with a flexible interpreter and run-time system. This flexibility is seen most notably in the ease with which one may to add new types and run-time operations [GG86] and change syntax [GW90]. However, using the Icon system to experiment with language extensions that have pervasive semantic implications, such as scoping or adding first-class procedures, requires extensive modifications to the run-time system. The Icon implementation is large, consisting of over 40,000 lines of C. Such modifications are therefore more easily accomplished in the context of a very hig...

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