Icon is a high-level programming language with extensive facilities for processing strings and structures. Icon has several novel features, including expressions that may produce sequences of results, goal-directed evaluation that automatically searches for a successful result, and string scanning that allows operations on strings to be formulated at a high conceptual level. Icon emphasizes high-level string processing and a design phi- losophy that allows ease of programming and short, concise pro- grams. Storage allocation and garbage collection are automatic in Icon, and there are few restrictions on the sizes of objects. Strings, lists, and other structures are created during program execution and their size does not need to be known when a program is written. Values are converted to expected types automati- cally; for example, numeral strings read in as input can be used in numerical computations without explicit conversion. Icon has an expression-based syntax with reserved words; in appearance, Icon programs resemble those of Pascal and C. The language is described in R. E. Griswold and M. T. Griswold, The Icon Programming Language, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, second edition, 1990.