Case study – designing graphics facilities in Unicon

Unicon's graphics are concrete and non-trivial in size. The design of Unicon's graphics facilities is a real-world example that illustrates some of the trade-offs in programming language design. Most programming languages don't feature built-in graphics (or any built-in input/output), instead relegating all input/output to libraries. The C language certainly performs input/output via libraries, and Unicon's graphics facilities are built on top of C language APIs. When it comes to libraries, many languages emulate the lower-level language they are implemented in (such as C or Java) and attempt to provide an exact 1:1 translation of the APIs of the implementation language. When higher-level languages are implemented on top of lower-level languages, this approach provides full access to the underlying API, at the cost of lowering the language level when using those facilities.

This wasn't an option...