Appendix: Unicon Essentials

This appendix presents enough of the Unicon language to help you understand the Unicon code examples in this book. This appendix is intended for skilled programmers and does not spend time introducing basic programming concepts. Instead, it presents Unicon while focusing on the interesting or unusual features compared to mainstream languages.

If you know Java, then most of the Unicon code in this book can be understood by looking at the corresponding Java code to see what is going on. You can look up whatever is not self-evident or explained by Java comparison here. This appendix is not a complete Unicon language reference; for that, see Appendix A of Programming with Unicon, which is available in standalone public domain form in Unicon Technical Report #8. Both Programming with Unicon and Unicon Technical Report #8 are hosted at unicon.org.

Syntactic Shorthand

The notation in this appendix uses square brackets, [], to denote optional features and...