World: r3wp

with that line, you need to know about SHOW and HIDE. If you set 
b/text like that, you need to do a:

show b

afterwards, or the face won't update.

HIDE just hides the face (I guess it's not really necessary to know 
for the above, but there it is).

Thanks, I will try to make myself an example to understand that further. 
 I have another small stumbling block here that I would appreciate 
some wisdom on please..

; This works

view layout [a1: area (to-pair rejoin ["80x" random 100]) button 
"ok" [print a1/size]]

; but not this
view layout [
    box effect [
        draw [
            line 20x20 (to-pair rejoin ["80x" random 100])]]
]


Is this because the dialect is different in one place to the other? 
I was heading towards using a slider to manipulate stuff on the screen, 
so this is a first step towards that.

I'm not sure, but the draw block should be composed. If you are only 
calculating the random position once per view, you can COMPOSE/DEEP 
the layout block or:

pos: as-pair 80 random 100

view layout [box effect [draw [line 20x20 pos]]]

(untested)

view layout [
	box effect compose/deep [
		draw  [ line 20x20 (as-pair 80 random 100) ]
	]
]

Yes, that works a treat, I suppose I could have found that from the 
documentation within a week. Now I will change the random for a slider. 
 Then I will try to make it show the line every time it moves position. 
(don't tell me the answer yet please, I only learn when my brain 
is a bit overheated). 

Would it be fair to say that Rebol is a linguist's language in that 
there are a lot of words, phrases & idioms to learn, rather than 
a smaller number of concepts that apply to everything but in a cryptic 
way?

I think it's fair to say that VID and VIEW are built on top of the 
REBOL Core. They are not intimately part of REBOL itself, and may 
not always have had the same care lavished on them as the core of 
the language.

So they tend to be a bit messier and fragmented. More of a work in 
progress than an attempt at the state of the art.

remember that you can have a very different syntax in dialects, so 
if you are not separating dialects from rebol code, you will be confused, 
because of seemingly conflicting syntax.

in fact you may be confused also by the fact that DRAW is an entirely 
separate dialect from VID.

but IMHO, it's not as bad as having to combine HTML/JS/SQL/PHP/CSS 
in a 20 line code block.

I can't remember being so excited about learning a new thing for 
ages. It is a great privilege to have access to such well informed 
teachers as yourselves. I feel like I have stumbled into first class 
helicopter travel when I only paid for a slow bus.

Nice to see your excitement mhinson.  I think here in this REBOL3 
world you will find all the expertise you need to master REBOL.

Well, I modified the code from draw-controls.r in the script library 
to get this. It is more complex than I expected, 

Is it a reasonable way to do this sort of thing please?

pos1: 20x20  pos2: 80x0
view layout [
	scrn: box rate 0:0:0.1 feel [
		engage: func [face action event] [
			if action = 'time [
				scrn/effect/draw: copy []
				append scrn/effect/draw [line pos1 pos2]
				show scrn
			]
		]
	] effect [ draw [] ]
	s1: slider [
		ss1: to-integer (100 * get-face s1)
		pos2: (as-pair 80 ss1)
	]
]


Next step is to work out how to make the thing that moves leave a 
trail.

view layout [box: box effect [draw [line 20x20 80x20]] slider [box/effect/draw/3/y: 
to-integer value * 60 + 20 show box]]

To leave a trail, you could append to the draw block (without setting 
it to a new block each time, as you've done above), but that would 
mean your draw block would get very big over time.

So a better thing to do is to draw onto an image!, which serves as 
a cache of your previous draw commands. For this, you can use an 
IMAGE instead of a BOX, and use the DRAW function to draw permanently 
onto the image. (The IMAGE style is very similar to BOX, but its 
'image facet is set to an image! for us, ready to use.)

Oops! No it doesn't !  IMAGE does *not* come initialize its 'image 
facet with an image! for us! We need to create one for it...

view layout [my-image: image (make image! 100x100) slider [draw my-image/image 
reduce ['line 20x20 as-pair 80 value * 60 + 20] show my-image]]

Another way to write that is:

img: make image! 100x100
draw-blk: [line 20x20 80x20]

view layout [my-image: image (img) slider [draw-blk/3/y: value * 
60 + 20 draw img draw-blk show my-image]]

The difference being we are using another word (IMG) to reference 
the image!, and the draw block (DRAW-BLK) is not created new each 
time, it is reused. Only the third value in the draw block is modified. 
That could become significant with large draw blocks.

Thanks Anton, that looks a lot simpler. It is going to take me a 
while to digest your suggestions fully.   I want to understand it 
well enough to appreciate exactly how this works & where I can read 
the code to deduce locations of thing like box/effect/draw/3/y  for 
myself.   I have been hunting through the documentation but there 
is such a lot of it that I may have failed to look in the right place. 
Thanks.

I advise you to review each facet in the face object:

	print mold first system/standard/face

and compare with the slightly larger vid-face:

	print mold first system/view/vid/vid-face


(Note, here FIRST is being used to return just the words of an object!, 
without their values. If you just probe a face it will fill up your 
console...)

Once you find a specific facet you are interested in, you can then 
probe it to see its value:

	print mold get in face 'color  ; == 200.200.200


and you can do this, of course, with any face you make, such as the 
BOX above.

Thanks for the extra information.  I am slowly piecing it all together.

Hi, I have continued to re-read the documentation for REBOL, and 
appreciating it more as I understand a bit more.

Are there any puzzels I could try to write a solution to, in REBOL, 
that would be good for a beginner please?

There is a puzzles group, and the corresponding puzzles answers group. 
 However, I don't believe the puzzles are easy.

It is hard for me to judge how hard a puzzle might be. I have some 
ideas of what I want to program for my self, but I get stuck too 
quick, so I need to exercise my understanding in a context where 
I can have a good chance of success.

Definitely these puzzles aren't for beginners. But have you already 
had a look at the cookbook at http://www.rebol.net/cookbook? That 
might be a good start trying to understand some of the examples there 
and go on from there ...

Here's how you can get a cross-section of all the VID styles, examining 
the same facet (TEXT) for all of them:


 foreach [style face] svv/vid-styles [print [style mold face/text]]

As you can see, only a few have TEXT set by default.

(mhinson, that's for you.)

Here's a puzzle I posed (because I wanted a better answer). The ensuing 
discussion is excellent:
http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlCHQQ

And here's another one. In both cases, there were excellent procedural 
solutions and parse-based solutions.
In both cases, the parse-based solutions were much faster:
http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlPCJC

Thanks Sunanda. I will have a go at it without reading any suggestions, 
then learn what I did wrong :-)   If I am not back in a week, send 
a search party.

That's kind of what I did.....First had the operational problem; 
then solved it with a procedural hack; then asked the experts to 
impress me. They did!

Good luck

I have a plan, but I am stuck before that as I can't work out how 
to reference the value of a variable in a block.
aa: 1  bb: 2  cc: [aa bb]  print first cc

I want it to print 1, but however I arange the brackets I can work 
out how to do it..  I know this is very basic, sorry.

You can do one of two things:

aa: 1 bb: 2 cc: reduce [aa bb] print first cc

aa: 1 bb: 2 cc: [aa bb] print get first cc

the get  function evaluates a word and returns its value, 

the reduce function evaluates a block and leaves all the results 
within the block

(to complement henrik's example)

in rebol, words are both litteral values and references to values. 
  a word can also be unbound, in which case it essentially refers 
to no value.

and dont kid yourself, this isn't as basic as you'd think  :-)  
I still get bit, even fater years of rebol experience  :-)

oops  fater=after...  darn I'm really infected by the reichart keyboard 
syndrome  ;-)

Thanks, that has bought me back to the position that there is an 
outside chance I can solve this. 

What was getting me was that sometimes print reduce cc/1 would return 
an interger & sometimes a word & I couldn't work out why.

storing the integers in the block  as suggested  cc: reduce [aa bb] 
makes it work right through my code. :-)  Thanks.

This is my first crack at it...  
blob: [1 23 25 26 27 26 24 2 13 56 57 58 59 34 23 7]
score: copy 0
top-score: copy [0 0]

repeat i (length? blob) [if/else ((blob/(i) + 1) = (blob/(i + 1))) 
[
	score: score + 1
	if (score > top-score/1) [
		top-score: reduce [score i]]
	][
	score: 0
	]
]
probe top-score

print rejoin [(blob/((top-score/2) + 1 ) - (top-score/1)) "--" blob/((top-score/2) 
+ 1 )]


Reading on I see it being solved with parse.. I will try to understand 
that now if I can...  I also realise my solution would be better 
if the repeat loop was 1 less than length. However running over the 
length seems to have no bad consequence in this case.  Thanks for 
the chalange & help.

It works, and it is more compact than my original -- so lots of bonus 
points there.


It's worth reading on to look at some of the other procedural solutions, 
and Joel's analysis. That'll give you some good tips on how to solve 
a problem like this using  REBOL's data manipulating tools.

The parse solutions then take it to another level :-)

I still dont feel up to the parse version of the first puzzel, so 
I have had a go at the first part of the second puzzel.  I think 
I am a bit confused about where to use var: 0 
var: copy 0

I have also got a bit mixed up with the use of global variables which 
I know is bad.  This is the code, which now dosnt seem to work since 
I put the variable initalisation inside the compress function, and 
tried to pass the variables to the function.. Dont laugh, but this 
is about 3 hours work.

raw-data: [1 2 3 10 11 99 101 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004]

sequence-break: func [count store result][
	if/else (count > 1) [
		append result to-pair rejoin [store "x" count]
		count: 1
	][
		append result store
	]
]


compress: func [raw-data][count: 1 store: reduce raw-data/1 result: 
[]
	repeat i ((length? raw-data) - 1) [
		if/else ((raw-data/(i) + 1) = (raw-data/(i + 1))) [
			count: count + 1 
		][
			sequence-break count store result
			store: reduce raw-data/(i + 1)
		] 
	] sequence-break count store result
]

probe compress raw-data


I am happy if my code is functional & easy to maintain at the moment. 
 I will never be an application developer but using small bits of 
code to increase personal productivity is IMHO a very worthwhile 
thing to try and do.

I'll just note that you should use either instead of if/else  ... 
the later is deprecated and slower

so it would be:

either (count > 1) [

you'd use  var: 0  since 0 (an integer!)  is not a series type of 
data.

I don't have the time right now to debug the whole of it though... 
 ':-/

Thanks for the tips, so either exactly replaces if/else

and I need to initalise series types with var: copy [] but not other 
types.   

These tips are great.. I just need to study it more & I shoud find 
my own bugs (and probably remember them too)  Thanks very much