General Information:

This area contains material related to the Icon programming language.
All material here is in the public domain.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Icon is a high-level, general-purpose programming language with
a large repertoire of features for processing strings of characters
and structures.  For more information, visit the Icon web site,
    http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon

If you're a newcomer to Icon, be sure you download documentation for
running Icon -- the details depend on the platform.  See the README
file in the doc area as noted below.

The subdirectories here are:

	binaries	Executable binaries (only) for different platforms

	contrib		User-contributed material; not tested by us

	data		Data for program construction and testing

	doc		Documentation

    historic	Past versions of source code for Icon packages

	imt		Icon meta-translators

	newsgrp		Icon newsgroup archives

	packages	Program packages for different implementations.
			Some contain source, while others do not.

See the README files in these subdirectories for more information.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About Downloading:

   Files with the following suffixes are text files and should be
transferred in ascii (text) mode:

	.com      (VMS scripts)
	.hqx      (Macintosh BinHex 4.0 encoding)
	.txt      (documents formatted for mono-spaced devices)

Files with the following suffixes contain binary information and
should be transferred in binary (image) mode:

	.bck      (VMS BACKUP)
	.exe      (MS-DOS executables)
	.gif      (CompuServe GIF images)
	.lzh      (LHARC packaged files)
	.pdf      (Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format)
	.taz      (compressed UNIX tar files:  zcat <file.taz | tar xvf -)
	.tgz      (gzipped UNIX tar files:    gzcat <file.tgz | tar xvf -)
	.zip      (PKZIP format packaged files)

Except for README files, file names without extensions also are binary.

In the doc directory, each .zip file contains a single PostScript file.
Such a file can be unpacked on Unix systems using either unzip or gzcat.

   Note:  Some files are images of diskettes.  As such, they preserve
the structure of the physical distribution as referred to in their
documentation.  One consequence of this is that, for example, there
are ARC files within ARC files.

   In some cases, ``natural'' file names have been modified to
conform to limitations of some operating systems.  You may need
to rename these files at your end.