World: r3wp

There is another aspect of this. Questions on functions names probably 
occur too often to not answer them by a proper language construct. 

I was always thinking that something like a SELF word in functions 
would suffice. A function would then be able to envoke itself, and 
only itself, without worrying about it's "name", whatever that is.

I am no language designer, though, I'm not able to overlook the implications 
that would have.

A SELF word in a function always evaluating to the exact same function 
wouldn't be very different from being a keyword, whilst Rebol claims 
to have no keywords. I don't see a way around this.

re 'self as a keyword: do not worry, Christian, many Rebol dialects 
have keywords, e.g. 'self is already a keyword of the object specification 
dialect, as I see it. Just the Do dialect is promoted to not have 
keywords, alghough the names of infix operators actually are treated 
as keywords in R2, as I noted elsewhere

But, when Rebol evaluates a function / the code in a function's body 
- isn't that the DO dialect at its work? 

An isn't

>> a: func [value] [value]
>> a: func [value] [do [value]]

pretty much the same?

Are you asking why whereof can't be a function ?

as far as I am concerned, I do not understand the people who ask 
for the name of the function - I never needed that, so it may be 
a design problem - they want to do something, that can be done in 
Rebol more elegantly, than they are trying to do it

I'd want it for better error reporting...
  error near append a b
  is not very helpful!
Hoping R3's stack etc functions will help.

but, I can define (easily) a special function specification dialect 
using the word 'self analogically as objects do, if that is of any 
interest

Ladislav, I think I'm with you on that. Asking for name of a function 
makes no sense in REBOL, code that relies on the name of a function 
better be rewritten to get along without.

But the fact that the question always resurfaces points to a where 
the REBOL programming paradigm isn't easy to grasp. The SELF aware 
function I mentioned above is a poorly worded mere thought experiment 
on that to ease the paradigm change, I was *not* suggesting that 
this should be standard behaviour of all functions.

yes, understood, it is OK, I just wanted to note, that you do not 
need to worry whether any specific dialect, like e.g. the function 
body specification dialect, at least for specific functions you define 
in the way that you find useful, uses any keywords you find useful 
for a specific purpose - that is the principle of Rebol dialects: 
do whatever you find useful

Don't worry, I see the humor in it :)

I asked this before .. but what's a good way of monitoring a large 
number of rebol processes on the windows platform?

Some of them are listening to ports, but others are just processing 
queues ...so the former I can open and close a port to them, the 
latter I can not.

And of course I'd like to be able to restart any processes that have 
locked up ...

One thing that I don't like is that if an encapped application dies 
with an error, it stays resident with any file locks active.  Wouldn't 
it be better to have an option to just quit ( writing a log entry 
first ) ?  So, then I can just check to see if the app is running.

can't you have a process to manage others using an udp port for instance 
?

some of these are core apps ...

R2 ?

all r2

and so, you could have a specific process which monitors the others, 
using tcp or udp, no ?

I can monitor some by tcp .. .but how can I use udp to monitor the 
others?

the others have some loop and wait process i guess, just insert a 
wait on an udp port as well

So, if it is doing stuff .. it will miss the udp ping ?

no, if the monitor accept some lantency; For example if a process 
is not responding after few pings.

But in the case of huge process, the client process should send himself 
a ping to the monitor to advert is doing stuffs (at some points of 
the code)

like a log file

eh ?

if you write to a log file, then that's like a ping to a monitor

But actually the monitor is a user app that they run from their desktop 
.. so it can't accept pings from the process.

but a port dialing is more efficient and has less overhead

why it can't ?

how does it know where the user app is?

Simple. Each time a targetted process start,k it send its id to the 
monitor. (hey ! Mr Monitor i'm here and my name is "toto")

it's a standard client/server exchange, each client has to establish 
a connection with the server.

So, I need a central server as well...

It's the monito actually. You have one monitor (the server) for several 
processes (the clients)

I guess it's easier to do it that way then have the user interrogate 
all the processes

the monitor open a tcp/udp port and wait for connections.

The monitor could be headless and run as a service, with a separate 
GUI process that runs in user space.

To run a rebol app as a service it has to be guiless

it's not obligatory a service.
When a client process start it try

it tries to open a connection with the monitor, it he connection 
fail, he launch himself the monitor, wait few seconds and retry to 
connect.

it he = if the

Right. A lot of software does the split process thing nowadays, sometimes 
with the GUI running in the tray (or whatever the OS version if that 
is).

if -> of

So, how does that work?  the core service launches a gui app that 
sits in the tray?

the monitor don't necesseary have the need of a gui

the GUI could be another client process