This article gives a quick introduction to the programming language Icon, developed at the University of Arizona. The purpose of this article is to tell you about one of the simplest and most powerful programming languages available. It's called Icon, and it is a language for people who love programming. Icon is used for children's games, scripture analysis, CGI scripts, compiler research, literate programming, system administration and visualization. Both types use familiar subscript notation, hold values of any type and grow or shrink as needed.
Lists take the place of arrays, stacks and queues.
Tables associate keys of any type with corresponding values. Here is a silly sample program that counts the number of occurrences of each word given on its command line and writes the words out in alphabetical order, along with their corresponding counts. A table is created with all keys mapping to a default value of 0. Then, each argument on the command line is used as a key in the table to increment a counter. The table is sorted, producing a list of two-element lists containing the keys and their values.