26 januari 1994 Concon 1.0 ANNOUNCEMENT In this directory you will find the entire package for the Concon programming language, version 1.0. Version 1.0 is the first public version. It was written by Ayal Pinkus. Concon is a small lisp interpreter. It will typically compile to 50 to 100 kBytes of code. It is almost platform independent, using only one platform dependent function at one place. It has been compiled on several platforms successfully, including the Atari 1040, IBM pc, and RS-6000 computers. This version will not contain binary executables for any platform. The user must compile the code himself. See section `getting started' in the manual. Concon is not a common lisp interpreter. Concon has some different mechanisms built the programmer thought appropriate. It has, for instance, the possibility of evaluating several expressions at the same time, usually called multi tasking. The several tasks (processes) can communicate with each other quite well. They use the same global variables and can use each others local variables. They can interact. An other fundamental of Concon is the use of methods. Methods are small pieces of code that perform a part of the action of a function. This way functions can be built up from smaller building stones rather easy. The methods mechanism was copied from the object oriented programming paradigm. Concon was intentionally made for symbolic manipulation. Up to this version the programmer wanted to make sure it was capable of doing just that. Future releases will have some new much used functions, but will be focussed mainly on speed. Concon isn't the fastest lisp interpreter at the moment (the major drawback). Concon might be made to run much faster in single mode (making multitasking impossible). A port might be made to systems of parallel processors. Concon is copyright by Ayal Pinkus. See file copyrigh.t . I have an interest in making Concon as transparent as possible. If you have any comments or questions as to inconsistencies, please write an email to pinkus@phys.uva.nl Also, if you made interesting changes to the source, added functions, or made a program others might want to use, please send it to me. If it is good, it will be distributed with the next version. Ayal Pinkus