Io Programming/Beginner's Guide/About

About Io

We cannot give a significantly better executive summary of what Io is than what's already on the Io language website:

Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

Still, it hardly does much to capture the essence of what Io actually is, how to use it to solve problems, or to extend its functionality with new features. This wikibook aims to cover all of these aspects, in varying degrees of detail. We start with the basics, of course; we assume that you, the reader, have had relatively little programming experience in the past.

One thing you should know is that Io has not yet received its 1.0 badge of honor. The language and its libraries are, while becoming more and more stable every day, still maturing. This wikibook was written with Io 20070410. This means that I used a version of Io that was "released" on 2007 April 10. While it doesn't mean that the entirety of the book will be invalid in the next release, please be aware that Io is an extremely fluid language (and is so by design!), and is prone to change over time as developers and users require.

About This Book

This work is disjointly licensed under the GNU FDL, the CC BY SA, and Io's license.

The authors of this tutorial are:

• Daniel Ehrenberg (LittleDan)
• Samuel A. Falvo II
• Olle Jonsson (just a note on String concatenation)

And many others who wish to remain anonymous.

Io Language Websites and Community

The Official Io Language Site

The quintessential root of it all, the Io homepage.

Todo

Stuff that needs to be done.

Examples

Paste your example code here.

Binding to C++

Learn how to bind Io using C++.

CGI

Accessing Io through CGI

Style Guide

How to write good Io code.

To talk to people working with Io and/or to get help, visit irc.freenode.net #io.

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