World: r3wp

ah... mine bound with each button press

USER-DATA in the window faces seems unlikely to be used to me. You 
could also probably use DATA without problems as well. It depends 
on whether any other VID extensions are being used in your system, 
which could theoretically use that facet for something. Of course 
you can associate the window with it's vid-context by other means 
which doesn't touch any of the window facets at all...

Graham: when you use vid-context/to, the word you pass in is set 
to an object. the object contains all the set-words you used in the 
vid block. example:

>> lay: layout vid-context/to [f: field g: button] 'ctx
>> ? ctx
CTX is an object of value: 

   f               object!   [type offset size span pane text color 
   image effec... 

   g               object!   [type offset size span pane text color 
   image effec...

A concrete example would help me here :)

now you can pass this object to your functions so that you can use 
them with many layouts.

eg. you make c: func [obj] [obj/f/text: "something" ...]

ok, so this does involve some rewriting of functions

and I guess is not that different to passing a context to a function 
as discussed above

if you really can't touch the functions, you might as well just reuse 
the same globals, no? rebinding them is also "global" so there's 
not much difference.

what's 'vid-context/to'?

I get an error?

It's in Gabriele's utility.r library which he mentioned on Saturday.

thanks...i missed that

If I had a large numer of sorted strings, how can I most efficiently 
find the first string which partially matches my search string.  
Eg. I want search on '"find*"

A hash doens't allow me to do a wild card search

http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=like.rlets you do more 
than find/any, but you're still going to have the overhead of checking 
each string. Depending on your needs that may work, or you could 
make one big string out of them and just PARSE that.

find [ "ab" "bc" "bd" ] "b*"

looks like I should try and get a hash for each first letter, first 
and second letter etc so I can at least narrow it down to the first 
3 letters and then do search on everyone after that.

How many strings and what kind of performance do you need?

18,000 strings....  real time.... as each time they type a character 
I am presenting a list of choices

I am emulating this http://rxterms.nlm.nih.gov:8080/

have you thought about using SQLite?

I wonder how that would compare with doing REBOL lookups

I was just thinking that!

The example helps enormously Graham, because you said "first string" 
but now I see you want all matches for a given prefix.

once I get the first string .. then I can easily get the others as 
I sort the 18k strings first

is the existing sqlite driver work over the wire or does it do in 
process calls?

Maybe I need RIF

I've never used sqlite

I wonder if Ashley's rebdb would work ...

He doesn't have a like clause ... but I guess it could be faked

Graham, did you try REFORMing into a single string and using FIND/ANY? 
I did a quick test here and it's instant for me with 18K random "words" 
making a 200K string finding the last word (non-random for testing).

Hmmm, some of the terms aren't single words though.

In effect you've created an index

No, just a list of single-value records. :-)

Actually I wonder why find/any shouldn't work on series like these

Or you can say I created an index and the query system with two function 
calls.

You mean a block containing string values?

sure ..

>> help find
USAGE:

    FIND series value /part range /only /case /any /with wild /skip size 
    /match /tail /last /reverse

Doesn't say blocks are not included

But it's not find/deep, which is what you want.

for the /match refinement

Since it's a read only db, perhaps I could use Cyphre's compiler 
:)

Not sure how /match is going to help you here. It only matches the 
start of the series.

>> find/match ["Aa" "Bb" "Cc"] ["Bb"]
== none
>> find/match ["Aa" "Bb" "Cc"] ["Aa" "Bb"]
== ["Cc"]

ok... find/deep then :)

for 18k strings, it seems overkill to use sqlite though

REFORM + FIND/ANY

Just sayin'. ;-)

I'm sure that it is fast .. but I want real fast so I'm going to 
see if I can create a hash

Perhaps Sunanda's skimp.r may be hiding some gems you could adopt.