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Just seems to be a lack of participation in the R3 process ... and 
I'm wondering if it's because the changes are too great

I think it's because the changes are very large, yes. It's rather 
impossible to do any real GUI work as long as VID3 is sitting in 
this current state, where we're trying to figure out how VID3 should 
work and that things might change from week to week.

probably get one of last year's builds and simply toy around with 
the layout dialect. current builds have VID3 left out.

yes, there are some design issues in that style creation is too complex 
and must be simplified. Carl and Gabriele are sorting that out in 
private.

it's probably a good idea to study it in order to find out how faces 
can work together and such.

I suspect we are only going to find it's limitation by starting to 
build small apps and see how it scales

I was told to hold off on documentation for VID3 months ago; pre 
Unicode release even.  And I may not be the best tech writer for 
the task anyway; as I didn't really "get it" to a level required 
to write the good end-user docs REBOL deserves.  We'll see what happens 
in the upcoming days.

I trust Carl to come up with something nifty.   VID2 is a dialect 
layer on the View engine, and I think Carl appreciated Ashley's work. 
 Much like the inventor a new paint watching an artist make a wicked 
cool painting.


Yeah, to do a proper job of documenting Gabriele's work requires 
some practice.  I try and write the user doc for his pdf maker "in 
pdf maker", and end up just confused enough to not make it work to 
a satisfactory level.  But I'll say, his work deserves to be rewarded 
more than it is currently.

And mainly due to the size of the user base.  We don't have enough 
hands to use (let alone even try) all the cool nifty stuff that is 
produced.

Gabriele, I like the ideas behind your VID3 and think that with only 
minor cleanups would be a GUI to brag about.

Hi, I want to create functions where all variables are local without 
declaring them. What is the way to do this currently and  in rebol 
3 ? thanks

I  use this for html blocks that have layout information (tags, strings, 
...) and bind them to a local value of the function creating the 
layout but I don't want to have to declare multiple variables

All referenced variables would include ones like 'for, 'if and 'and. 
It seems to me that you want an object, not function local variables. 
That would be much easier to do in R3 with the improvements to bind 
but you can do it in R2 as well.

No such thing. You would have to rewrite most of the mezzanines and 
natives to make a practical pure functional REBOL, as almost everything 
causes side effects and aliases. Pure functional languages tend to 
only be efficient when compiled - when interpreted they are dirt 
slow.

You can manually use REBOL as a pure functional language, but it 
will be much slower and have more overhead.

On the other hand, there should be nothing stopping you from making 
a pure functional dialect that compiled to imperative REBOL, and 
the result might be faster than all but the best hand-coded REBOL, 
once you get past the compiler overhead. If you can compile ahead 
of time that won't be much of a problem.

Well, code that is written with aliasing issues in mind tends to 
look pretty much like mostly pure functional code, and function result 
chaining gets rid of a lot of variables. We have been trying to make 
functional programming styles easier in R3 and some of that is getting 
backported to R2 starting with 2.7.6.

Many of the series functions are modifying though, and reassignment 
is used a lot.

New Core elements to support VID, and REBOL/Services being ported 
to R3

Peter; It's bad in a non-bad kinda way.  REBOL 2 seems to be keeping 
quite a few rebols in pay checks.  That's good for coders but bad 
for ongoing public buzz.  Buzzing about a loved hobby is completely 
different than buzzing about (still loved) work.


Gabriele did me a huge favour getting the REBOL in mediawiki extension 
plugged in and it sits waiting.  There is still work to get DocBase 
REBOLized, even if there is a slow down in the "fast pace, visible" 
R3 developments.  DocBase is really for us, the community, so it 
goes in spurts.   Next step (6 months later) is to make it so posting 
up MakeDoc is simple and easy, keeping in the REBOL headspace, including 
the document markup.

In fact both. I worked on a multi-user contact management application 
that connects to a SQL database (mysql and sql-server). There are 
some main areas I want to investigate into : DB access (Trebase could 
be a sexy alternative to other db engine), GUI and business logic 
processing. In the last area, I think that rewrite some code in R3 
can produce more elegant and more efficient program. I'm one of the 
guy who used hash! datatype ;-)

Karim, then I think it is a bit preliminary to consider porting:


- mysql, postgress - while those schemes are built upon raw TCP R2 
stack as a schemes, someone would have to port them to async R3 networking 
kernel

- sqlite - requires mostly DLL access. There is no DLL access in 
R3 and maybe there will not be one like we know it in R2. Carl is 
not decided yet, if we go via DLL layer like in R2, or via standardised 
plug-in interface, which is not ready though, as it needs modules, 
which are not ready either

- GUI - Gabriele was working on new VID. It is now called VID 3.3 
(third prototype). It is still not complete. But - Carl is trying 
to follow slightly different obectives, so he decided to rewrite 
it and bring us VID 3.4 prototype (probably called GIDI)

- View, unless Cyphre fixes some harsh bugs in its kernel, is pretty 
much buggy and makes VID3.3 crash in few secs to minutes.

That is the reality. I will try to talk to Carl, so maybe we will 
be able to plan on next release and define featureset, which gets 
completed and released.

OK. Thank you for the informations. I think the release notes of 
next public version needs to define what can change and what's will 
remain quite the same until the beta or final release. Then it will 
be easier tu us to know on what we can focus.

can't chat and code at the same time, I think. ;-)

In the meantime I re-read port documentation, and try to study http 
scheme, but this is hardly usefull for the community, as I am not 
the one able to bring in e.g. ftp or other scheme anyway :-)

Well, Carl effectively killed Gabriele's VID3 by saying he was changing 
it ... and so we wait.

The bad thing is, that while we could have more than one UI, Gabriele 
does not seem interested in finishing it, and noone apart him is 
probably technically skilled to finish it ....

There's no point in finishing VID3 if VID3.4 functionality strongly 
overlaps, so we'll have to wait and see whether it does. If it does 
not, then VID3 can be finished as a separate project.

That assumes that the technical ability (of which there is lots) 
and the programmer time (of which there is little) is available.

not just that, it usually has to be the same person starting it and 
finishing it. that's why many open source projects fail. :-)

Carl is at this very moment the only one working on it, so we're 
waiting for VID3.4. Once the prototype is out and evaluated we can 
move to the next hurdle.

What other hurdles are we expecting and/or what is the projected 
release timeframe?

I don't see how Carl has time with the ham radio hobby and wine making 
and a ranch to run etc... - let alone the day to day running of RT.

You mean for the team to work on and it sounds like they are busy 
with other stuff.

I've been working with REBOL since 98 and gotten use to their schedules. 
 This is nothing new.

We do have some very specific things that need to be done, such as 
FTP and making other protocols and REBOL/Services (which has been 
ported now). I need to get VID3.4 done, so I can work on GUI and 
graphics.

You if the item in the data was the word red then it would show up 
in the text list on just that line as red same with blue and any 
other color they would show up as their own specified color.

I recall someone (don't recall who) made a REBOL gui that wasn't 
square but oval shaped and based solely on faces (no layout use).

Was very functional and fast.

in the mean time, it looks like VID for REBOL/View 2.7.7 might contain 
considerable additions, such as GUI resizing and proper error parsing 
of layouts.

maybe sometime. we have DevBase and an AltME world for it, so people 
are submitting patches to it.

It's the R2 beta world. Anton is quite active there. Devbase for 
R2 and R3 is the same place as well.

Wildman is a "secret project" that examines the question: what is 
the minimal environment for running REBOL? Can REBOL operate natively 
on specific hardware, and if it did, what components would be necessary 
to be successful? This project will begin early spring. Complete 
development will depend on our results and possibilities for potential 
funding.

yeah I have to think that Carl is thinking portable here maybe phones 
and tablet style systems.

When Carl asked me about VID3, I posted my objectives to the VID 
group, and to him. Few days later I needed to study, if Rebservices 
would be good for our kiosk advert system. It could be, but I refuse 
to work with it, if it does not change. It is difficult to use, the 
layering has to change. And Carl agreed to some extent. Expect some 
changes to it in the summer months.

<aside and joking>

Anyone that is getting tired of waiting for R3.  Do what I did; get 
out of the computing field for 5 or 6 years, do some manual labour. 
 And then on return, regret missing out on all the nifty developments 
and racing to play catch up.
</joking aside>

P.S.  I do regret not following REBOL development from the day shortly 
after Graham made his (to me) famous 2nd millennium post to comp.lang.forth 
till some 18 months ago.  I always feel just that little bit left 
out as I learn things that many of my REBOL heroes have grown, to 
what I see as, "been there, done that".  I want to get there and 
do that too!

And, just so you know.  I envy you, your history with REBOL - watching 
all the incremental changes and involvement in this; one of computing's 
greatest experiments.

I don't bother about not having Rebol3 complete. It is an amateur 
project (read this: done in the spare time). The timeline I have 
posted into the ML last year seems the correct one. VID for the end 
of 2008 / start 2009 and the other things complete for the end of 
the year 2009.

Oooh, I'll disagree on the "amateur" comment...completely.  A small 
team of  people it may be, amateur it is not.  Even I've been paid 
for REBOL work and I still count myself a clown.

I have used "amateur" to reflect the time that the development group 
actually seems to have available for developing REBOL3 and not its 
quality.

I totally agree with you about the "high quality skilled professional" 
but do you agree about the fact that to not be a amat.... (no, lets 
change the word you don't like) "Part Time project" the development 
team must work 8/12h over 24 and 5/6 days a week exclusively on REBOL 
?

However, I admit I have used a difficult word that could hurt and 
upset someone... hei but is discussion made only of gentle words 
? No ! Sometime we need salt and pepper !!

Yes I do agree, and I also think that IS the case.  The core developers 
are full-timers.  It is just that the core team is very small.  And 
even some of the helpful volunteers, BrianH, Nenad, Pekr, Ashley, 
Henrik, Gregg ... too name but a few, probably get less sleep than 
they deserve due to REBOL developments.  Efforts we get to benefit 
from.  No doubt you yourself felt a little sleep deprived when you 
did the massive R2 document push to the wiki.  :)

I remember starting a form of REBOL documentation project way back 
in the early days.  I ran a REBOL documentation search engine which 
was all M$ based and Holger I think it was came back and said they 
liked my site greatly but thought I need to ensure that REBOL was 
captilized.  Every since then I tried to remember to Capitilize REBOL.

Oh and Giuseppe, just so ya know ... I do count myself as amateur, 
in the main ... rank amateur.  Clown even.  :)

The thing is as follows - I talked to Carl almost on daily basis 
some two months back, for quite some time. And I am glad, that RT 
has some strategy. Those who say otherwise, are not correct. But 
- having some strategy and being able to fulfill it, are two different 
things.

If you notice rebol.com R3 strategy page, you will clearly see - 
VID revision (happening now), and then LNS revision in order to be 
able to release DevBase, and finally sources, both C and R level, 
to let ppl plug-in imediatelly - that will make us busy, will not? 
:-)

I can see the release of open-source parts really crucial, as it 
will allow for some fixes, and to start porting efforts, better understanding 
of REBOL internals by the community ...

The thing I don't understand is RT and its investors, and the organisation 
(management) of the project. There are fatal mistakes, like letting 
Gabriele go to work for Qtask for 1 months, ending in 6 month delay 
in VID development.

What Carl should realize is that it's not feasible to compete in 
this world as a one man band even if you're a genius.  You need to 
open source as much as possible, and I think it's a mistake using 
Altme.

Occasionally RT behaves like a quasar but then drifts back into an 
ordinary black hole ... and we bathe in cold Hawking radiation.

Pekr, I have a clear vision of the development cycle and time: 2010 
is the year we will go out of beta.

I like the project and I appreciate the effiorts of Carl and the 
community and I take it as is. It is a gift of a genius which has 
spent a lot of money during the years and which surely doesn't have 
other golden treasures to give to project.

Petr, I think you overestimate the competition.  Rebol has an enduring 
quality that, so long as the company keeps going, will be very relevant 
in 2010 and beyond.  Just as it's relevant now, despite previous 
predictions to the contrary...

I am not sure I overestimate it that much. There is several layers 
to my statement. As for the technology and its quality, I can agree 
- REBOL is nice technology. But - from the marketing/adoption side, 
you have some open windows available. The first one was during the 
momentum of REBOL being new. We wasted it greatly. I can see another 
widnow being open, for some year or max two years back - RIA. I do 
remember when I first tried Adobe Air - it was a joke. Attempt at 
non system UI, and they repeated some mistakes of ours. Now we can 
see articles about Flash/Flex, Silverlight, Curl, etc., but no REBOL. 
In 2010 that market will be well established. Mobile players will 
choose their technologies and they will not be able to look back.

It is really important to get R3 out the door in 2008.

I find it interesting that there is so much focus on comparing REBOL 
to Flash/Silverlight. REBOL does far more than both of them together 
do. In the long run, I think REBOL can become more relevant than 
Flash or Silverlight, as they are narrowly focused technologies that 
at some point will become outdated and replaced by other technologies 
that do a better job in the same narrow field. REBOL has no such 
limitation.

Narrow field? Why do you consider them being narrow? Is Action Scrip 
somehow limited? And look into most mp3 players, their UI, their 
games, etc. - everything Flash based. The market for such device 
starts being crowded. We will see what impact will there be on Android 
and Symbian in the future ...

It may well be a missed opportunity for Rebol as a front end, but 
frankly I'd rather see R3 done right than speculatively rush it to 
market.  I see greater opportunities in the future for a feature 
complete, mature R3.


Even if R3 were the perfect combination of front and back end, RT 
does not have the leverage of Adobe or MS to establish R3 in the 
way you suggest.  The future of Rebol as I see it is in the grassroots, 
and for that, R3 must be all that it can be.

I said it already many times and now there is a new opportunity, 
quicktime browser plugin is today much more popular thanks to iTunes, 
it is installed in more than 80% of personal computers. quicktime 
once had a wired scripting language (qscript), Live stage Pro was 
the only editor for that. Now apple just announced they are working 
on Quicktime X, they will either drop scripting completely or they 
will put something new in. That new scripting in the quicktime plugin 
SHOULD BE REBOL !! it is a win-win solution. rebol would have access 
to  about 200 media formats, apple will offer the best language for 
scripting medias, and not limited to that. See, apple really has 
no interest in seeing flash ported to the iPhone, because the sell 
iPhones games on their iTunes store, and many other reason. Also 
in the last year apple has enhanced javascript ability to control 
quicktime movies in the browser. I have no idea about waht agreement 
apple and RT should come to, but I'm sure nobody can argument against 
this theory! Long life rebol! 8-)

If you want to see REBOL expand then build APPS and distribute them 
with a BSD license.   If REBOL isn't "everywhere" then it isn't just 
Carl's fault - it is ours also.

quicktime always sucked, sucks now, and will suck forever. It can 
take FF3 down. Besides that - who is Apple to define "standard"? 
Who caros of .mov container? That format is rudiculous and irrelevant 
:-)

ok Pekr, it suck but it still is one of the most installed browser 
plugins, add rebol to it and you get rebol installed on all those 
computers on the next quicktime upgrade, or try and have people install 
rebol plugin.. ;-)

I guarantee you, that .mov is pretty much ignored by Windows users, 
and very often found being obtrusive. It is recognised by those favoring 
Mac platform, but not otherwise. Yes, REBOL as a system language 
of anything would be benefical, but that will not easily happen imo 
...

Petr, Apple actually succeeded in making the MOV format a standard: 
the MP4 format is indeed MOV with some restrictions. Notice that 
MOV and AVI are both IFF clones (AVI just has the length in reverse 
order, indeed it's called RIFF, while MOV swaps chunck type and length). 
The way they are being used is another matter :)

Gabriele, I understand you. Mov might be technologically even superior. 
So I don't know if it is licencsing of Apple or ignorance of Windows 
probrammers, but - I just want to use one codeck pack - ffdshow for 
e.g. It is some 5 years I met some video, which was not able to work 
with it. Any player! But - quicktime is painfull exception! I don't 
want quicktime player! I want it to play with any player I choose. 
And it does not seem being so. So, I have also VNC, just to have 
such problems as getting sound, but not picture, etc. So - no mov 
for me.

Petr, I hated QT on windows too (or Itunes etc.). And, I hate the 
fact that MOV are often very hard to handle with open source software 
(eg. the DV videos produced by iMovie could not be processed on linux, 
but this was a couple years ago). But, I don't think it's the format 
at fault here. mplayer for eg. can easily play any MOV (as well as 
FLV, AVI, MKV, etc.), and VLC too, and they are both open source, 
so in principle there are no obstacles.

Hello Carl and VID3 dev team i'm wondering something. I recently 
read alot on rebol3  lot of things are hsarper (VID3  is  really 
more performant with drawing statements for example). But as much 
i read so far I didn't found information about several topics.

What are the memory management enhancement proposed ? We all saw 
how it was difficulte to manage the mémory in previous rebol. For 
small data content that not a big issue but as soon you start to 
play with grafical content the mémory stack is amazing ( for example 
this code http://shadwolf.free.fr/berlinClock.ziptakes 10Mo  when 
running and in my opinion that from far 9M mega wasted ...). Can 
it be a way to make the recycle function more efficient to trap all 
non in use data

next thing is the VID2 event system in same code we can see the rate 
face feel function don't allow the  event handling for the other 
face the Quit button for example.  (still in same code). Those things 
are trivial and i don't imagine to have to search hours and hours 
a way to solve them.

last thing is the "extension" modules  I would like to know how  
it's planned to handle them  when u add an external DLL to rebol 
VM your goal is not to have to rewrite a brigde code for each of 
your DLL you want to work with and you don't want too your rebol 
application code to be over complexified in regard to the regular 
rebol code wich use shaped  dialects. I know that's not easy thing 
to do ....

VLC is handling MPEG2  too and hum it's patented and hum lets say 
the authors hum .... how to say ..... hum .... well they just don't 
care

There's no reason that the authors of VLC should care about software 
patents, shadwolf: Where they live (France), software patents are 
illegal and can be ignored. Go France!

of course a face and a GOB is not directly comparable, but just run 
the 1000cows.r demo to see the difference :-)

although I'm not really that worried. if VID3.4 will be very different 
and inferior to VID3, it's important to have Gabriele finishing VID3 
to have a viable alternative as soon as possible for proper GUI development.

if VID3.4 does not live up to our requirements of completeness and 
scalability. basically all the things that are currently wrong with 
VID, then VID3 will be the way forward.

For example in VID it's very hard to build a well-functioning popup 
menu due to some restrictions on panels, clipping your content and 
you can't put things outside the window. in VID3.4 it should be simple 
to make a popup.

then you make an input model, which maps controller behavior to what 
you want to get out, and then you could use it for regular input. 
this would work the same for input devices that some handicapped 
people use.

but I think it makes sense. I've studied the problem a bit. Everyone 
else makes special cases out of it, rather than a generic system 
for strange input devices. I had hoped that VID3 could be the first 
GUI ever to do this. It would mean that you can write a GUI and a 
handicapped person or a person using handwriting recognition would 
be able to use it without modifications.

It was prompted by using the speech recognition system in MacOSX. 
While it's fun to use, it only lets you speak certain commands and 
only within the currently active window. There's no real system there, 
but if there was, it would be awesome.

do you write directly in the field and then it's translated to normal 
chars?

that might not be accurate measurement of Development. DevBase was 
actively update also by community. But when Carl works on something, 
and only he knows about some area of development, noone can update 
it. I assume first alpha of VID3.4 (GIDI) in August at max. I think 
that whatever system you come-up with, the basic idea can't take 
longer than few weeks. And few weeks ago I got info that Carl had 
already some parts running ...

Carl mentioned that he liked the dialect and didn't want to change 
what it would be capable of, but that was before the announcement 
of the new networking scheme, which apparently is somehow integrated 
with VID3.4. There is for example a SEND command in the new dialect, 
so I guess he wants to make it extremely simple to build networking 
code into a GUI. I just hope he does it right. :-)

I mentioned to him that the communication is big problem in my opinion. 
Those silent periods do really a bad damage. I can't imagine any 
bigger company taking RT seriously. You either have private life 
and ranch, or you treat your company profesionally ...

I'm not sure it really causes damage. The end outcome of his work 
will be the same and luring people with tidbits might just be a timewaster.I 
get the feeling he does not want to reveal more details before the 
design is more solid. It's one of those things that during the design 
process might turn 180 degrees and become something else, because 
most good ideas don't come to you until some time late in the design 
process.

takes away some time, unless you just ignore all comments (at that 
point, one can just not release at all...), and it is sometimes frustrating 
when the same comment you have answered many times gets made every 
day.

heh :) well, that's not bad actually, it's just that there are times 
when i should focus and not look at altme, but i end up not doing 
that.

i think this is Carl's way to focus - as henrik says, just go underground 
and get the thing done. i do agree with petr that this is not nice 
to the community though.

Gabriele - your perception of user feedback is wrong in two things 
- 1) your design was so complicated, that average programmer (me) 
was not able to understand it in all aspects, hence repeating questions, 
and Carl also mentioned he had some difficulcy in studying it 2) 
just one user (pekr) commenting - let's face the reality - it just 
shows devastated state of REBOL community. I try to name the situation 
as I can see it.

It is not possible to do any serious development or planning. VID3 
was supposed to be done in 3 - 4 weeks. Then "one month" break came 
for you to work on Qtask, which, in fact, took 6 months? Cyphre is 
fixing critical View bugs for 3 months already, with no result. And 
those are the facts. Just don't understand me wrongly - that is nothing 
about your, Cyphre's or anyone's skills, or Qtask causing it - but 
those are still the facts.