Icon

[ahy-kon] /ˈaɪ kɒn/

noun
1.
a picture, image, or other representation.
2.
Eastern Church. a representation of some sacred personage, as Christ or a saint or angel, painted usually on a wood surface and venerated itself as sacred.
3.
a sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it:
an icon of womanhood.
4.
a person or thing that is revered or idolized:
Elvis Presley is a cultural icon of the 20th century.
5.
Computers. a picture or symbol that appears on a monitor and is used to represent a command, as a file drawer to represent filing.
6.
Semiotics. a sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.
1.
a combining form meaning “image,” “likeness,” used in the formation of compound words:
iconology.
/ˈaɪkɒn/
noun
1.
Also ikon. a representation of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or a saint, esp one painted in oil on a wooden panel, depicted in a traditional Byzantine style and venerated in the Eastern Church
2.
an image, picture, representation, etc
3.
a person or thing regarded as a symbol of a belief, nation, community, or cultural movement
4.
a person regarded as a sex symbol or as a symbol of the latest fashion trends
5.
a pictorial representation of a facility available on a computer system, that enables the facility to be activated by means of a screen cursor rather than by a textual instruction
combining form
1.
indicating an image or likeness: iconology
n.

also ikon, 1570s, “image, figure, representation,” from Late Latin icon, from Greek eikon “likeness, image, portrait,” related to eikenai “be like, look like,” of unknown origin. Eastern Church sense is attested from 1833. Computing sense first recorded 1982.
icon
(ī’kŏn’)
In a graphical user interface, a picture on the screen that represents a specific file, directory, window, or program. Clicking on an icon will start the associated program or open the associated file, directory, or window.

An image used in worship in the Eastern Orthodox Church and among other Christians of similar traditions. Icons depict Jesus, Mary, and the saints, usually in a severe, symbolic, nonrealistic way.
language
A descendant of SNOBOL4 with Pascal-like syntax, produced by Griswold in the 1970’s. Icon is a general-purpose language with special features for string scanning. It has dynamic types: records, sets, lists, strings, tables. If has some object oriented features but no modules or exceptions. It has a primitive Unix interface.
The central theme of Icon is the generator: when an expression is evaluated it may be suspended and later resumed, producing a result sequence of values until it fails. Resumption takes place implicitly in two contexts: iteration which is syntactically loop-like (‘every-do’), and goal-directed evaluation in which a conditional expression automatically attempts to produce at least one result. Expressions that fail are used in lieu of Booleans. Data backtracking is supported by a reversible assignment. Icon also has co-expressions, which can be explicitly resumed at any time.
Version 8.8 by Ralph Griswold includes an interpreter, a compiler (for some platforms) and a library (v8.8). Icon has been ported to Amiga, Atari, CMS, Macintosh, Macintosh/MPW, MS-DOS, MVS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Acorn.
See also Ibpag2.
(ftp://cs.arizona.edu/icon/), MS-DOS FTP (ftp://bellcore.com norman/iconexe.zip).
Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.lang.icon.
E-mail: , .
Mailing list: [email protected].
[“The Icon Programmming Language”, Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold, Prentice Hall, seond edition, 1990].
[“The Implementation of the Icon Programmming Language”, Ralph E. Griswold and Madge T. Griswold, Princeton University Press 1986].
(1992-08-21)
graphics
A small picture intended to represent something (a file, directory, or action) in a graphical user interface. When an icon is clicked on, some action is performed such as opening a directory or aborting a file transfer.
Icons are usually stored as bitmap images. Microsoft Windows uses a special bitmap format with file name extension “.ico” as well as embedding icons in executable (“.exe”) and Dynamically Linked Library (DLL) files.
The term originates from Alan Kay’s theory for designing interfaces which was primarily based on the work of Jerome Bruner. Bruner’s second developmental stage, iconic, uses a system of representation that depends on visual or other sensory organization and upon the use of summarising images.
IEEE publication (http://ieee.org/organizations/history_center/cht_papers/Barnes.pdf).
[What MS tool can create .ico files?]
(2003-08-01)