1. [n]  a conventional religious painting in oil on a small wooden panel; venerated in the Eastern Church
2. [n]  a visual representation of an object or scene or person produced on a surface; "they showed us the pictures of their wedding"; "a movie is a series of images projected so rapidly that the eye integrates them"
3. [n]  (computer science) a graphic symbol (usually a simple picture) that denotes a program or a command or a data file or a concept in a graphical user interface

Icon
A study of the work of artist Frank Frazetta, one of the most well-known artists associated with science fiction and fantasy book covers.

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1. \I"con\ ([imac]"k[o^]n), n. [L., fr. Gr. e'ikw`n.]
   An image or representation; a portrait or pretended portrait.
         Netherlands whose names and icons are published.
                                                  --Hakewill.
   

2. \I"con\, n. (Gr. Ch.)
   A sacred picture representing the Virgin Mary, Christ, a
   saint, or a martyr, and having the same function as an image
   of such a person in the Latin Church.
   

1. 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 <[email protected]> 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.

   , MS-DOS FTP.

   Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.lang.icon.

   E-mail: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>.

   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].

2. 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.

   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.