World: r3wp

I never got into Forth more than playing around, but I *love* the 
idea of the immersive experience. REBOL is that in many ways for 
me, because I can think about so many things using REBOL as a context. 
I think the idea of dialects could lead us to domain specific environments 
that are like Forth, in that they are highly focused and immersive.

Forth Inc will send you a copy of of Swiift   http://www.forth.com
 it has a block editor, but they've moved away from supporting it 
so they could 'do Windows'...a pity.  And wait...did I say Forth 
was "just another language"?  Where did THAT come from?   Long live 
REBOL.  :)

:-)

Ok, I'll read some more of this. I've already started a dialect (more 
like an intepreter as with BASIC). I'll have a real REBOL dialect 
(that can be used in the middle of REBOL scripts) in mind as well, 
as I go along.

[InfoQ Article]

Language-oriented programming : an evolutionary step beyond object-oriented 
programming?
http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/09/Language-oriented-programming


Fowler defined this concept as “the general style of development 
which operates about the idea of building software around a set of 
domain specific languages”.

According to Martin Fowler object-oriented 
domain modelling allows to “build up a vocabulary” but the grammar 
– ways to combine these vocabularies – is not defined; DSLs add this 
grammar side. Therefore language-oriented programming inducts “this 
shift of moving from thinking about vocabulary, which is objects, 
to the notion of a language that combines vocabulary and grammar.”

Interesting article Richard.

I wonder of any of those well versed in languages (Greg, btiffin, 
Geomol, Max to name a few) would want to respond to this posted question 
related to the above article  "What language you would use to develop 
DSL?" ?

If I had to quickly pick an order;  REBOL, Forth, SNOBOL, Lisp.  
If I was told I HAD to do it in a class based object oriented language 
I'd probably pick SmallTalk ... no ... I'd probably just leave.  
To be honest, I've rarley seen a DSL that didn't require a programmer 
to script it anyway, so... I find the whole thing kind of moot.  
Moot is the wrong word.  A non-coder MIGHT be able to VID up a GUI 
but I doubt it would do much...or by the time they were done, the 
non-coder would have unknowningly become a coder.  I've not seen 
a DSL I'd turn over to Bob the manager to write progams in.  Even 
languages written to be specific; Erlang for telephony, Forth for 
telescopes, are still programmer languages. REBOL comes soooo close 
to being a data language that humans can use...but unfortunately 
nope;  Programmers required.  The magic all happens when you can 
build up layers, and stand on the shoulders of giants.  Something 
hardware engineers have been doing since day 1...programmers might 
learn by day 32'767 if we get lucky.  No doubt our smartest programmers 
will be fussing with strings 50 years from now with the same basic 
problems and mind sets faced 50 years ago.

A. It doesn't matter what language you use.  That's like two kids 
that speak English saying.. "lets invent a new language..  what language 
should we use to invent it with?"

I'm going to try to make time to respond on the ML later today. It's 
a good topic.

It matters if it's a dialect Terry. If you wanted to create a special 
language to discuss neclear physics, do you think it would make a 
difference if you based it on a Mathematical foundation versus Basque?

Read this today, re programming language choice; http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html
  Down near the bottom is the Appendix: Power. and leads to http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html
 I can read the languages he uses as examples, but only a few of 
them come close to the readability of   foo: func [n] [func [i] [n: 
n + i]]  or am I just too sucked into REBOL/Think?  It's too bad 
the page has extra space around the brackets, as at a quick glance 
REBOL would be in the top four shortest. It's as quick grokable (meaning 
a quick glance implies a function returning a function that accumulates) 
 as Dylan, LUA, Javascript and NewtonScript.  And who uses Javascript? 
 :)

hmm, but  foo: func [n] [func [i] [n: n + i]] is wrong

foo: closure [n] [func [i] [n: n + i]] is necessary for this to work 
reliably

example:

    f1: foo 1 f2: foo 2

    f1 1

should yield 2, not 3!

another reliable implementation not using closure: foo: func [n] 
[use [m] [m: n func [i] [m: m + i]]]

Learn something new here everyday.  :)

In this context I am not going to offer the Curl examples for DSL 
and pass-the-proc except to say that ... no , I won't say that either 
;-)

But Gregg, the reference was towards a "language that combines vocabulary 
and grammar"...  sounds more like "Energy equals mass times the speed 
of light squared", rather than E = MC2

I understand; my point was that mathematics, as a foundation, allows 
you to express things in a domain that Basque, historically, does 
not. A DSL doesn't *have* to be an extension or outgrowth of an existing 
language, but that can often help. In order for tha that to work, 
you need to choose a base language that suits your needs.

Has anyone written a dialect to capture live sports action?  Here 
are some examples of the types of items needed to be captured...

Volleyball... http://www.wnmu.edu/athletic/stats/07vb/29wnmu.htm#GAME.PLY

Hockey... http://www.nhl.com/scores/htmlreports/20072008/PL030416.HTM

Soccer... http://www.uefa.com/competitions/ucl/fixturesresults/round=15109/match=301604/report=mbm.html

what would the dialect do?

What I am going to attempt is a dialect that will respond to single 
key-strokes to tell the story of a match and at the same time capture 
the statics for the live game.  Hopefully the end result  will lead 
to many different tools based on this data such as statistics visualizations 
in the form of data summaries/reports and charts.

It looks pretty parse friendly.

The sport I am most interested in doing this for is Volleyball as 
I have experience coaching this sport.

Yes, I was thinking parse would likely be the way to go.

Each skill would be given a character on the keyboard and would expect 
it to be followed by a player number and the level of success of 
the player attempting the skill.

As I haven't worked much with Dialects I wasn't terribly sure how 
to start, so was looking for some dialect examples that might influence 
my starting point.

well, first I'd build the skeleton for the dialect for parsing a 
single line. then I might add some actions to it and then expand 
it to handle multiple lines.

The first line of the volleyball page http://www.wnmu.edu/athletic/stats/07vb/29wnmu.htm#GAME.PLY
, the line starting 1-0,  _might_  be represented by the following 
keystrokes...
s43a23b50
So, 

s = set attempt, 4 = player Cola Svec, 3 = set attempt level 3 - 
perfect set

a = attack attempt, 2 = player Jeri Walkowiak, 3 = attack attempt 
level 3 - kill

b = block attempt, 5 = player Jessica Lindgren, 0 = block attempt 
level 0 - error

I might need to add a team designator like H = Home, V = visitor 
as it could be complicated to catch live play and may need to establish 
which team inorder to correctly identify a player.  I may also need 
to use a separator between each keystroke if I want to identify the 
player by jersey number.

I will need to start playing with this to see if I can come up with 
something and then maybe get some feedback on my attempts.  I don't 
know when I would get to this but thought I'd through it out there.

If this is typing in real time, space would be the best seperator,

anyone know how to parse this:

{<table><table></table><tr></tr></table>}

It is a table with an empty table inside, and also a Table-Cell

for some reason, using recursion...I just can't seem to put my finger 
on the right combo.

What's the goal?

parse rules that will give a true if parse/all {<table><table></table><tr></tr></table>} 
RULES

(using recursion)

like  Tables: [Table Tables | Table]

Table: ["<table>" Content "</table>"]

...and so forth.

rule: use [table row][
	row: [<tr> </tr>]
	table: [<table> any [table | row] </table>]
	[table]
]

As Robert de Niro said in one of my favorite movies of all time, 
"Analyze This"  "...hey, you...you're good!"

rfc: I have a (not so) little function that attempts to match a block 
of values to a given specification.  Example:

	>> probe match [%image.png :red 300x100 /old][
	[	file: file! | url!
	[	size: opt pair!
	[	attributes: any get-word! | refinement!
	[	]
	make object! [
		file: %image.png
		size: 300x100
		attributes: [:red /old]
	]


There's not much to the rules, they are -- one (default), opt (zero 
or one), any (zero or many), some (many).  If they don't match, they 
return an error.  Any suggestions?  Optimizations?

	http://www.ross-gill.com/r/match.r

Ways of making it smaller???

One of the desired effects is precedence, for example:

	match [http://rebol.com%image.png][
		link: file! | url!
		image: file! | url!
	]

Returns:

	[link: http://rebol.comimage: %image.png]

I do something like that, but text based, in QML. not sure if it 
can be of any help.

.