World: r3wp

I have the feeling that would be a very good starting point. I'm 
a little hazy on what is offered for parsing in Rebol at the moment. 
I'll look into that next. I think that once you have read a file 
into memory, it is in block form and you can use natives like "first", 
"next", "find" and so on on it. If so, then I would be going that 
way for sure.

read file --> string
load file --> block

Strings and blocks are both series, so first, next find etc work 
on both, but when you load you get a block and the units are values. 
When you read, you have a string and the units are characters.

When you load, the file has to be LOADable by rebol, which means 
everything in it must be parseable into rebol values.

When you read, the file can be absolutely anything. I usually have 
to read web pages and parse a string, for instance.

How about that old way of starting with a text-adventure? Write a 
framework and let the learner add some special item?

actually denis, for introducing looping I'd use foreach before while. 
 while is rather hard to grasp in the begining, cause its easy to 
bugger up the end conditions and end up in infinites loops.

for example, in parsing a sentence, foreach could make you very easily 
traverse the whole string like so:
foreach letter sentence [print letter]

also remember that find, does not copy the series, it returns the 
serie at a different index.

to extract substrings without use of 'PARSE you can do:
substring: copy/part find sentence "debut" find sentence "fin"

in the above, the string "fin" is not included, since find returns 
the start of the match by default... to include it, just add the 
/tail refinement.

substring: copy/part find sentence "debut" find/tail sentence "fin"

this can allow you to explain optional arguments later on in funcs. 
  also as an easy exercise, you can ask them to return the substring 
without "debut" or "fin"... (simply switch the /tail to the first 
find)

Anton, Maxim: noted. Hum... will have to test what happens if I use 
"début" with the accent. In VC++ console mode, the output doesn't 
use the same character table as the editor. Didn't think of checking 
this yet, but the classe will be held in French so I should check, 
although this is not vital.

Volker: good idea. "old way"? I've never seen this approach used 
before (and I'm not young). But I think it would be very motivating 
project for these students. I'll use this suggestion.

I've talked to one of my colleagues about Rebol and he's checked 
into it. He's interested also. So it is becoming more probable we 
will switch to Rebol to introduce basic programming concepts as well 
as to empower them with a programming tool to build very small applications 
to complement the scientific software at their disposal.

My colleagues suggest that we use the View GUI. He feels that it 
is simple enough to code a graphic interface with this. I admit I 
have not looked into View much. My preconception is that adding the 
graphical layer complicates things too much (like Windows/C++). Maybe 
I'm wrong as Rebol is concerned?

you are wrong :-)

well, just kidding ... it depends .... easy things are easily don 
... if you will insist on OS behavior compatibility, there might 
be some work included - but for scientific kind of stuff, it is pretty 
good imo. I do remember how relatively easily I got my results with 
Matlab ..

you may look into RebGUI project - consumes less memory (mostly non-issue 
on PC), provides more styles, resizing, more proper behavior to styles, 
try to go thru demo AND look into tour.r source - you will see how 
nicely readable the gui part is - you don't need to go into internals 
too much ...

RebGUI, something new to me. In fact, we probabably just need an 
interface to enter data and start some process and show the results. 
Maybe draw a graph with the results - that would be great. Will look 
into it. Tks.

You may want to take a look at Matt  Licholai's quick plot dialect 
for your students to use to plot results. The details are at http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlQBZK

Scroll down the thread to find the location of the source.


There is an updated version of his ez-plot example in the script 
library at http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=ez-plot.r

Maybe you can use Rebol and  try to implement a curriculum similar 
to HtDP.  

The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum 
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-htdp-vs-sicp-journal/

My preconception is that adding the graphical layer complicates things 
too much 

 -- A valid concern in many environments, but VID is great, and simple, 
 for simple things.


view layout [button "Show help" [alert "Sorry, I can't help you"]]


No need to manage the event loop, no redraw handlers (until you need 
to get into them of course), just put an action block after a face 
style and it binds to it automatically.

.

.

.

Did that "online school" that was talked about ever get tested? How 
did it work out?

I never heard anymore about it.

Could not find a free tool that allowed al the features we wanted.

The best we found was TeamSpeak for Voice.

It needs Chat (writte), Talk (Spoken), Video, and several Whiteboards, 
and a way to view somoeone's computer screen.

We use TeamSpeak all the time.

Tell me what is out there, and I will get this started.

Google Desktop has a plugin that makes GTalk able to make a chatroom, 
and another that allows you to share part of your screen with someone 
on your buddy list.  I don't know how well they work, thouhg

though*, as I never found anyone else to test it with*

Reichart, can you list the ones that you tried, but failed your criteria?

Can you tell me specifically what I have to learn (master) in Rebol 
(mainly instructions) to code these projects:

Project 1: Read a web page given a URL, find some data in the page, 
append it to a file on disk. Read the given disk file et show the 
data on screen.

Project 1;  Check http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/documentation.r?script=weblinks.r

Project 2: Establish a two way connection using tcp/ip and save the 
history on disk.

Project 2; check
http://rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0028.html

btiffin, for project 1: very interesting. tks

For project 2, it seems to use View... any suggestion without View?

Also (in general) check
http://rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore.html
in particular load and save  and  read  and write commands
http://rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-12.html#section-4

I'm looking for a LEARNING MAP that could be used as a fast track 
to learning to build interesting little applications.

There are so many options (modifiers) to Rebol instructions that 
it isn't immediatly clear what core essentials should be learned 
first, or what general structure of Rebol syntax should be learned 
to become effective rapidly.

Yeah, that is kinda in the progess of being built.  There are some 
awesome resources
but they need to be tracked down sometimes....

The cookbook  http://rebol.net/cookbookbeing one starting point.

rebol.org  has a lot of scripts, but it requires reading code a lot 
of the time....
The REBOL Viewtop  (desktop command at console)
    REBOL Folder ->Tools->Word Browser is not bad for options

I'm sure, as the pros keep saying, that once you have learned Rebol, 
it is very fast to code applications. The problem is that it might 
be that to get to that point takes quite a while

I can read the code. The thing is I have yet to get to a point where 
I can sit down and start thinking code to do things.

REBOL/Core and /View has builtin  help  as well...but it can be terse

I'm looking for a set of basic essentials, of sort, that can be taught 
to a beginner so that he/she can start coding useful stuff in, say, 
3 to 5 hours.