World: r3wp

Yes, that's the way I do it. exactly. My problem is that I often 
add some field and have to go back and add it to all the functions.

And so I was looking for a global way without the global (if you 
know what I mean)

well, you can create a context inside your functions

nope .. that won't work.

I looked at that and it creates an object. Would be ok then my laziness 
shows up and I don't want to have to use object paths.

won't work anyway

Looking at "bind" it appears it should work. It even describes an 
example which is what I want to do:


Binds meaning to words in a block. That is, it gives words a context 
in which they can be interpreted. This allows blocks to be exchanged 
between different contexts, which permits their words to be understood. 
For instance a function may want to treat words in a global database 
as being local to that function. 

unless you declare the variables as local , or use [ local-variables 
.. ]

well, you still have to bind either using 'use or 'bind

Graham, it's really about laziness on my part.

BTW, sorry to hear about your site.

if you're lazy, your code will break!

I know. And when I do add things like new fields I'm just asking 
for trouble.

Graham, this should work.

o: make object! [
    page: "1"
    total: 4
    records: "22"
    rows: reduce [

        context [id: none cell: ["Quantum of Solace" "Marc Forster" "2008" 
        "Daniel Craig" "200"]]

        context [id: none cell: ["Casino Royale" "Martin Campbell" "2006" 
        "Daniel Craig" "150"]]

        context [id: none cell: ["Licence to Kill" "John Glen" "1989" "Timothy 
        Dalton" "36"]]
    ]
]


i.e. objects become objects and blocks become arrays. What exactly 
was breaking?

Gregg, Hello. He was trying to help me.

I'll give it a go.

Hmm.  Seems to work .. but it help to have an example of how it is 
supposed to work!  no docs.

Just wondering what it takes to write a "printer driver".  If I pretend 
to be a network printer listening on port 9100 ... can I just capture 
all the data coming to me or do I have to respond to interrogation 
as well?

RFC covering Internet Printing Protocol are listed here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol

I'm not sure that IPP uses port 9100.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1179

I remember that I  did once a rudimentary lpd/lpr, but i forgot on 
which pc

Graham, because we can write to a printer with:

Interesting .. I never bothered before to find out what IPP was.

write tcp://<ip-number>:9100 <some data>


it should be straight forward to act as a printer listening on port 
9100.

Since you can dump to a port on a jet print server on port 9100 ... 
I assumed it was dumb.

Yes, that's how I do it now .. I just write to port 9100 to print 
PS on a  network printer.

so if I have a daemon listening on port 9100 will windows recognise 
it as a IP printer??

basically the idea is to try and write a fax driver by acting as 
a printer port, and then sending the print to an internet fax.

Ah, good idea...a virtual printer in REBOL! That would make a nice 
framework if you can expose a simple API.

I was just thinking that as soon as the driver receives a file, just 
popup a requester asking where to send it to ....

and pehaps a simple address book.

Cyphre's systray code could come in useful into making this a systray 
application

Any value in a function that swaps the values of two variables?

a: 1
b: 2
swap a b
b => 1, a => 2

a: also b b: a

In R3:
>> help swap
USAGE:
        SWAP series1 series2

DESCRIPTION:
        Swaps elements of a series. (Modifies)
        SWAP is an action value.

ARGUMENTS:
        series1 (series! gob!)
        series2 (series! gob!)
>> swap a: "abc" skip a 2 a
== "cba"

Graham, I say yes. R3's SWAP could be extended to support words and 
enable your example to work.

Or we can do this:
set [a b] reduce [b a]

But SWAP is probably more neat.

for english speaking countries, is it  a reasonable assumption that 
if you have a negative timezone you use mm/dd/yyyy but if you're 
not negative, you use dd/mm/yyyy ?

excluding western samoa .. but I don't have any users there AFAIK

and hawaii ...

oh well.... I guess I have to read the windows registry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_by_country

Looks good to me ... I think I'll just keep my rule :)

Graham, write a format-date function, that also take country code 
as input and produce the correct viewing format for a date. Then 
upload it to the library.

parse-out-date: func [trial [string!]
	/local day month year tmp white
] [
	; look for dd/mm/yy and dd/mm/yyyyy and dd/mmm/yyyy formats
	white: charset [#"/" #" " #"-" #"," ]
	either parse/all trial [
		copy day 1 2 digit white
		copy month [3 8 alpha | 2 digit]
		white
		copy year [4 digit | 2 digit]
		to end
	] [
            print [ day month year ]
            
		if parse/all month digits [
			; month is numeric
			if negative? now/zone [
				; swap the month and dd around
				tmp: month
				month: copy day
				day: copy tmp
			]
		]
		if error? set/any 'err try [
			return to-date rejoin [day "-" month "-" year]
		] [
			return none
		]
	] [
		; did't parse the date
		return none
	]
]

this is extracting the date from OCR'd text ...

also copes with 1 January, 2010

Hmm.. perhaps I need 

1 2 white copy year ....

I think it's doing the same...

parse-out-date: func [
	trial [string!] /local day
][
	trial: parse trial "-,/"	

 if all [negative? now/zone day: take next trial][insert trial day]
	try [to-date form trial]
]