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As good as REBOL is it could use a good IDE environment.  AmigaVision 
comes to mind.  I would be interested to see whether some large chunks 
of change were invested to put them over the top.  Right now R3 needs 
a message. What makes it special and valuable. What vision does it 
conjure up.

The business model incompatibility was the only criticism I had - 
the product looks good, with a lot we could learn from and possibly 
do better. I'm not a marketing guy though, just a social analyst, 
so I can't help on the message.

And maybe 10-20 more gurus.

Hypercard worked because it had a very simple IDE approach.  Power 
users became proficient at scripting and teachers shared their cards.

I'd be willing to bet I could net $100000 next year teaching REBOL, 
no matter what happens with the language and tools.  Just using them 
as they stand.

In a classroom, imagine if the "powerpoint" allowed students to connect 
their smart phones to the presentation and control aspects of a weather 
simulation, or control a point on a Cartesian coordinate plane.  
The trick is to make this so easy to do that teachers can do it like 
they make power points.

Some teachers will want to do more and they will begin to learn how 
to write scripts.

I think a little funding would go a long, long way towards bringing 
REBOL back up to speed, and back into a relevant and competitive 
position.

Chalkboards, textbooks, paper and pencil, etc. are all technologies 
that can mediate learning.

Spreadsheets, calculators, and lab equipment have been used effectively.

Powerpoint is one of those things that really doesn't do much mediating 
because it lacks interaction.  All it needs is a REBOL back end to 
connect the students and make it interactive, especially if it can 
also be used in small groups.

Yes, and a REBOL back end would make the next "tougher" layer easier 
to dig into.

VID and other similar dialects had the greatest potential.

The kicker would be quality formative assessment tools that would 
give teachers and students feedback on how they are doing.

Scot and Nick, Rebol has been my secret weapon. Despite trying to 
get others to look at it.

And I with you Scot on wanting an IOS version for precisely for the 
ed market.

I don't think much has to change.  REBOL just needs to be updated, 
the look modernized, and ALL the modern platforms supported.

It's original purpose and benefits are still totally values.

BrianH, you would and should be a god there!

RT made terrible marketing and business decisions.  There is absolutely 
no reason why REBOL shouldn't be a big success.  RT just didn't make 
it happen.

And vocalized them clearly.

I hope Doc has the technical chops to pull it off, because his head 
is in the right place, and the right perspective about the market.

A lot of people said a lot of stuff on both sides. And I meant die 
on a societal level, not just for RT. And I meant back before 2000. 
A lot of people thought they knew stuff back then, but most of that 
knowledge was really belief. For one thing, back then people in the 
free software camp thought free software would succeed because of 
principles - very few knew that those principles would be irrelevant 
and that practical considerations would make it succeed for other 
reasons.

In fact, that sort of thing turns people on when they hear of your 
drive and success

Thanks for taking this up NickA, james_nak, BrianH.  Teacher tools 
in a Classroom Suite.  I have a friend in high places.  I'll pitch 
it and see what he says.

And Brian, my context is for you is creating for the educators and 
not being "one of them."

So this discussion is allowing me to synthesize some ideas that might 
be workable.  Perhaps a symbiotic sort of relationship like Stanford 
and Xeorox park for educational technology.  I'm up for a faculty 
spot in So Cal.  Fingers crossed.

And more passionate involvement

Scot, it is ironic because just today I was observing an elementary 
school lab and assessment and true validation was the subject.

Yup. We don't have a clue, to be honest. We talk about learning environments 
but we dont' really know what they are and how they work very well. 
Still stuck in reductionist thinking.

Sociocultural thinking sounds good and makes people feel better about 
the learning experience, but we don't know how to measure it.

Yes and these were elementary 1st grade Sped kids!

Oh, and Brian and Nick, what I was looking at was all subscription-based....$$$

I need a lot of oil these days. Scot, I am glad to see that you're 
still ticking and doing well.

Subscriptions work only at the district level.  That is a long difficult 
sales cycle and you need to get a 5 year commitment.  Sales of a 
product works at the classroom and school site level.

Scot, I've been teaching professionally for 27 years, and my understanding 
has always been based on the idea of building habit.

Well - and maintaining interest - that's just as important.

And I'd like to be able to write code like some of the guys here.

I am a learning scientist (and really always have been) so my interest 
in from the perpective of the learner and the community of learners. 
 This has put me at odds with administrators and teachers at times.

I think we carry "ways of relating" with us into various contexts 
and situations.  Taking interest is a way of relating.

That what I thought, thanks -- but could not see it in curecode, 
and don't remember it in earlier versions. So it may be Something 
Very Clever :)

Nope, it's an APPEND bug. Please report it (and thanks for all the 
reports lately).

@GrahamC: Thanks A LOT for prot-smtp.r and prot-send.r.  I was able 
to send an email from R3, but only after changing a line from:

	ehlo: any [ port/spec/ehlo "rebol3 user pc" ]
to
	ehlo: any [ port/spec/ehlo port/spec/email ]

@GrahamC: I understand what you're saying, but how do mail programs 
like Outlook and Thunderbird figure out what to send EHLO?

Outlook and Thunderbird can "just" look up what your local machine 
claims to have configured as hostname.

I understand what Ladislav is saying.  The current text implies that 
there is a series of random values, and one will be picked.

Or it could mean that there is a series, and one of the values will 
be picked randomly.

Moving from the 'random topic back to prot-send.r, I found a somewhat 
serious bug with attachments and base-64 encoding.  I sent the exact 
same attachment using webmail and R3.


at position 32677 in the email sent by webmail (the headers are slighly 
different sizes and the base-64 line breaks are different between 
the two clients) we have the following data:


eMHgCm4jUznXtDnpVKaErkAc107QbjVC6siyHYBu96hxLUjnXDKeWqPOTzVmWxuUY7kJ+lRGF16x

tn6VmO4ncYpZX34HYU0qw7EU3afSgdyUKCvy1s6DpEN3doL93jtyD9089Caq6bZO0g3Llj0Wu8t9

OhsNDu7uUK9wYiq/7OeOK1p03Mwq1eXRbnnUVuZJcKCecD3rctbVbYjdy5/Si1ks7WTLyAerYzUH


at position 32521 in the email sent by R3, we have the following 
data:


vaHNtZYHTmoHtcDpXRSQDk1UeMHgCm4jUznXtDnpVKaErkAc107QbjVC6siyHYBu96hxLUjn
XDKeWq

doL93jtyD9089Caq6bZO0g3Llj0Wu8t9OhsNDu7uUK9wYiq/7OeOK1p03Mwq1eXRbnnUVuZJ


I copied the three lines of data around where the problem occurs. 
 On the short line in the R3 data, the following sequence is missing:


POTzVmWxuUY7kJ+lRGF16xtn6VmO4ncYpZX34HYU0qw7EU3afSgdyUKCvy1s6DpEN3


You can imagine the kind of trouble that causes with binary data. 
;-)

You can throw more words at the problem to try to make things less 
ambiguous, but that doesn't always work and tends to make your speech 
patterns a little off-putting or overbearing. Some people don't take 
well to overly-precise English. You have to balance things.

can you capture the attachment before sending and dump them to see 
if the problem is in building the attachment or sending it ...

I managed to send pdfs and mp3 larger than that with no errors ... 
and I think zip files so that it would test integrity but never did 
any checksum testing

and sending here https://github.com/gchiu/Rebol3/blob/master/protocols/prot-smtp.r#L284

so it waits for the 'wrote event and then once that  happens it writes 
again

which is here and thereafter https://github.com/gchiu/Rebol3/blob/master/protocols/prot-smtp.r#L312

Yes.  If it fits inside the buffer size, it works perfectly.  Tested 
and verified.  It may be fixed in the latest build, but I don't have 
the latest ARM Linux build, and won't have time to build it until 
tomorrow at the earliest.

How about writing to a file and sending to the port and seeing if 
there's a difference ...

No views on this at all.....Just noticed it as a difference and wondered 
if it was a principle or an accident.

You should not understand it so that we discussed the FOR loop behaviour 
- I demonstrated the typecheck necessity on a different example, 
which Carl noted and used in the FOR case as well.

Also, in my opinion REPEAT is a special case of FOR and note that 
in R3 REPEAT and FOR are compatible, which is not the case in R2.

But you are talking about very high-level features. R3 is designed 
to be modular, so most things that need to be built-in features in 
R2, should be add-on modules or extensions in R3, even the ones that 
we include by default. And some of what you request has been started 
already, such as the database stuff which ChristianE started, and 
I have been using every day for more than a year.

But yes, we need more schemes (also in included-by-default modules) 
and a decent CALL, agreed.

And a better console, built on R3-GUI. And better text-mode console 
support for systems where you can't use a GUI.

Still, all of that can be added on or retrofitted, that's the whole 
point of being modular. Having them implemented and available before 
3.0 would be a good idea for marketing reasons (don't knock those, 
they're important), but not having them done before 3.0 won't break 
user code the way not doing core semantic changes before 3.0 would. 
People will be working on these before 3.0 comes out because they 
need them, and the ones that we as a community consider to be the 
most important to include in 3.0 will likely be worked on the most. 
But the great part about that stuff is that it doesn't have to be 
developed as part of R3 itself, just like the GUI is being developed 
separately.

Personally, I want to work on the database support because that is 
what I need the most and have the most experience with. I expect 
that others will need networking stuff more, and yet others will 
need CALL or a better console.

The situation is the same for Red. Kaj or anyone other maight claim, 
that we have CURL networking. But for me, that is not the REBOL I 
want. I want port/schemes abstraction, period, or it is not REBOL 
like environment for me. It does the job, but so does ASP .net. You 
are one of the top developers for R3. I want you to know my opinion 
(maybe I am alone feeling that way, and that is fair enough), so 
- let's use what defined REBOL - ports as an abstraction mechanism, 
schemes upon that, etc.

I agree with BrianH, and I also can see where Pekr is coming from.

I'm not a C developer, so I don't feel like I can do much to add 
to the sources of R3.  However, what attracts me to Rebol, and what 
makes me want to use Rebol, is that I can do just about anything 
with relative ease.

There is no such thing as a complete package anymore. Things are 
changing too quickly, and in too many directions. People need the 
stuff they need, and they need to *not have* the stuff they *don't* 
need. There are too many completely different platforms now. We can't 
afford to be monolithic anymore, since that will just mean that we 
won't be compatible with what most developers need to do, since most 
developers need to do stuff that is incompatible with what most other 
developers need to do.

BrianH: well, as for many scenarios, I can accept SDK like environment, 
where I choose, what to include, but for some ppl, some R3.exe should 
exist, which should contain some agreed upon functionality. If we 
go just with the opinion of let's have bare bone core.exe, and the 
rest via some includes, that scares hell out of me, really. That's 
like other languages, loosing what made REBOL rebolish.

Pekr: I think what you are proposing is something that any user could 
put together and offer to the community, using what BrianH proposes 
as the foundation.

Just because it's modular doesn't mean it can't or won't be bundled, 
and in many cases imported by default. We can do one-exe builds with 
modules inside, that was the point from the start.

Actually, implemented earlier than that, but Carl had me redo the 
module system in 108 and that particular feature wasn't fully reimplemented 
properly until 109.

The question of what to include by default is never easy, but can 
be guided to some extent by what is not just popular, but also has 
a well-defined standard that is useful. e.g. HTTP and FTP are standards, 
No-SQL is not. SQL92 is a standard, but is a strict SQL92 dialect 
useful?

As far as compatibility between REBOL-like languages, it's a similar 
situation. Being able to load most values into compatible datatypes 
is the foundation, and being able to build mezz-level compatibility 
code will let us build things at the next level up that can work 
across languages.

SQL is more than the language, it's a storage and execution model. 
As long as we support the storage and execution model we can let 
the SQL servers/libraries process their own scripts. Our own model 
can just translate the R3-style port model (if we decide to do this 
as a port) into SQL operations, with the ability to send SQL code 
directly as a fallback.

Compatibility: Yes, that is why I am more concerned with syntax compatibility 
than semantic (unless it's so low-level and obvious that not being 
compatible would be stupid). Dialect compatibility can be done with 
dialect processors, in the Rebol way :)

This means that the difference between an ASCII character and a higher 
Unicode codepoint is significant. ASCII characters can be detected 
with a single byte of lookahead. Higher codepoints require multiple 
bytes of lookahead. That means that for most parsing models any rules 
that require multi-byte stop sequences are quite a bit more complicated, 
slower, and for some parsing models impossible. So I'm hoping we 
can fix this.

Question (not sure if this is the right group): do R3 tasks work, 
and if so, hwo to use them?

Tasks sort of work. They actually do start, but there are a lot of 
unresolved problems in the internals, and some of what is supposed 
to make them work properly hasn't been done yet, and some stuff like 
the synchronization and sharing models hasn't even been designed 
yet. So it's not really recommended that you use them yet.

Thanks....It seems odd though, given the different (and for me unexpected) 
results here:
    join  to-typeset [integer!] []
    join  [] to-typeset [integer!]

Hopefully the commit message is gives a clear explanation (and explains 
the motivation).

Brief restatement: BROWSE isn't working on OSX -- the current implementation 
tries two system() calls: xdg-open and x-www-browser

One problem with the existing implementation is that xdg-open and 
x-www-browser are searched for in the PATH, so executables with the 
same names in a PATH directory that takes precedence will yield different 
behaviour.

Sure. And in the has-a-url case too.

So better just file a CC issue for the `browse none` crash, and we 
can discuss the desired design in there.

Will do. And I'm still revamping the REWORD ticket example code.

And i doubt browsing to file:/// is the desired default.

It would be worth taking none out of the argument spec and marking 
the ticket as a problem until we figure out how to do this correctly.

Yes please, if we have an appropriate one. And if we don't, we should.

TO_OSXI and TO_OSX

sys-system.h is unused, and only there to cause confusion :)

And we have no common defines for "all of ..." at the moment, unfortunately.

Should be defined and passed along in your makefile.

Squash the two 1992-related commits into one, and also mention the 
CureCode ticket in the commit message (something like "This fixes 
CureCode issue #1992.") and submit a pull for that.

For NONE I see the following options to fix the crash right away: 
either remove the NONE feature altogether (removing functionality 
that currently sometimes works on Win32), or use http:// on POSIX 
(as a not totally reliable workaround), or move the early exit to 
the POSIX specific code (creating a cross-platform incompatibility 
between Win32 and POSIX platforms).

This SO chat seems quite nice, perhaps I should sign up. The interleaving 
of CureCode and Github feeds works well.

Andreas, I have an interesting Git problem related to R3 and the 
new version of VS2012. Git both in Github and now in VS are both 
detecting a couple files in the build directory you helped me make 
as having changed or being new. I thought that whole directory was 
ignored in .gitignore, so it seems weird.

And a step of 0 makes it not run and return none, instead of triggering 
an error? Is that right?

Oh, and please don't be bug-for-bug compatible in your R2 version. 
If you find bugs in R3's version, let's report and fix them, now's 
the time :)

If we define the FOR function with a special-case that a step of 
0 will definitely not make the loop run, and have the function return 
none, that makes for some simple tests to add to rebol-tests. Just 
have it break/return something other than none in the code block. 
Like this:
[none? for i 1 1 0 [break/return 1]]
[none? for i 1 2 0 [break/return 1]]
[none? for i 2 1 0 [break/return 1]]
... maybe.