PDF Ebook Unicon 3D Graphics User's Guide and Reference Manual
Version 11 of the Unicon language includes 3D graphics facilities. This document describes the design of the Unicon 3D graphics facilities, and provides several examples detailing their use. Most application programming interfaces for writing 3D computer graphics applications are complicated and difficult to master. Toolkits such as OpenGL [OpenGL00] and Open Inventor are powerful, but several weeks or even months are needed to gain proficiency. Even after gaining proficiency, many lines of code are required to implement most features. There is much that can be simplified.
Unicon [Jeffery03] is a superset of the Icon programming language [Griswold96] that offers many features that minimize the time and effort spent programming. Programs written in Unicon require from two to ten times fewer lines of code than programs written in languages such as C, C++, or Java. This report describes a set of simple, easy to use 3D graphics facilities for Unicon.
Icon and Unicon already provide facilities that simplify the process of programming 2D graphics applications [Griswold98]. Unicon’s 3D graphics facilities are based upon and integrated with the 2D facilities. Unicon’s 3D facilities are built on top of one of the leading 3D graphics libraries, OpenGL. OpenGL is more widely portable and available than most similar toolkits.
This paper discusses the design and demonstrates the use of Unicon’s 3D graphics facilities. Section two contains the design of the Unicon 3D graphics facilities. Examples and sample code can be found in section three. References for functions and attributes are found in section four. The implementation of the Unicon 3D graphics facilities is discussed in [JeffMart03].
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PDF Ebook Unicon 3D Graphics User's Guide and Reference Manual
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