AltME groups: search

date-to-epoch: func [
    "Returns a unix time (epoch) format from a date."
    date [date!]
][
    ; If no time is given, negate our zone to give us 0:00 UTC
    if none? date/time [date/time: negate now/zone]
    ; This uses the epoch base in UTC, so we assume that either
    ; the date is also in UTC, or has a zone offset included.
    ; DIFFERENCE fails for huge time differences, so we subtract
    ; them instead, giving us a difference in days, and multiply
    ; by the number of seconds in a day.

    either attempt [positive? res: to integer! difference date 1-Jan-1970/0:0:0] 
        [res]
        [date - 1-Jan-1970/0:0:0 * 86400.0]
]

eg.  next form 100 + now/day

will give you 2 digits, and those less than 10 will have a leading 
zero

A similar  problem has been reported in the past, and dismissed -- 
so not considered a bug by the developers:
   http://curecode.org/rebol3/ticket.rsp?id=1767&cursor=12

Not intending to start a religious war, but it's interesting what 
opinions about such and other qualities of rebol people have.

Or is Rebol an OverForth type language which is too syntactically 
*liquid* to use in long-term industrial and long-term stable projects? 
Could anyone comment?

REBOL is a full-fledged, high-level language. I use it for commercial 
work. R2 is very stable, but does have a small number of things that 
may never be fixed. Only you can say if they would cause you problems. 
The bigger issue is that RT doesn't seem to be maintaining REBOL 
anymore. The hope is that Red, World, and others will mature enough 
to be viable options.

beginner question:
i'm opening a file using
    d: open/direct/lines %bigfile.nt
i am then looping through each line using:
    while [ln: first d] [ ;do something here ]

i need to record the byte position of the start and end of each line...
how?

I think you will have to calculate them yourself using length? ln 
and adjust for newline/cr as appropriiate.

wrt mod-api... yes, and no, I was temporarily assigned to another 
project, but should get back to it tomorow, so I hope to have a release 
next week.

how do i detect the newline used in %bigfile.nt?

 - you can read the first line from the port to work out it's length 
 and then read the fiirst line + the two subsequent bytes in binary 
 mode to check whether they are lf + first char of second line or 
 cr +lf.

Watch out for text files that are edited on Windows and other systems 
and end up mixing different newlines

Or give a name to your window:
view lay: layout [...]

and call "show lay" when you make changes. This will refresh the 
whole widgets in the window.

It's better to refresh what you've updated, not the whole window, 
as it is much more slower. But when you are testing it is easier.

This is only partly true.


It is in fact faster to SHOW the whole window, rather than calling 
SHOW multiple times for single elements, when there are sufficiently 
many elements in the window. Still, SHOW also depends on the size 
of the area to display, so if you have, say 10 fields, wrap them 
in a PANEL style and then perform the SHOW on the PANEL instead of 
the whole window or the individual fields.

The number of lines may go up or down at times. There is a lot of 
experimental code and some dead code in it.

The dialect way and setting it outside the dialect is different. 
I prefer never to use the dialect to set face data, other than button 
names and fixed labels, as they don't change anyway.

Remove the argument to FUNC in the UPDATE-WINDOW function, and it 
should work

NOW returns current datetime and GMT. If I changed my GMT settings 
REBOL doesn't reflect the new settings.

Is there anything I can do to get new GMT settings? Otherwise long-running 
tasks cannot get the correct GMT. Any idea?

If you are running your app on a system that might switch time zones, 
it's best to keep track of time internally in the UTC zone (+0:00). 
This is a little different for R3 and R2.


R3: Use now/utc to get the UTC version of a datetime, or for a stored 
datetime d use d/utc. It does the math for you.


R2: Whenever you get the time, subtract the zone offset from the 
datetime, like this:
>> d: now
== 8-May-2012/11:36:01-5:00
>> d: d - d/zone
== 8-May-2012/16:36:01-5:00
>> d/zone: none
== none
>> d
== 8-May-2012/16:36:01

These should probably be wrapped into TO-UTC-DATE and TO-LOCAL-DATE 
functions, so the R3 vs. R2 differences can be resolved.

Thank you BrianH.

My question is, REBOL process (console or encapped app.) doesn't 
automatically detect of the time zone settings change of the PC.
>> now/zone
== 3:00

>> ;I changed my local time zone to +2 GMT or it changed automatically
>> now/zone
== 3:00


Is there a way to "refresh" zone in NOW, without closing and reopening 
the app.

Let's say I get the Windows time zone using a Win32 API. Then something 
like
>> now/zone: 2:00
== 2:00
>> now
== 8-May-2012/23:45:16+3:00 ;doesn't work

Hi, I need again your help:
I have an invalid image in my database.
I update images inside my window and I use this code:

	if not error? [to-image load news/immagine] [
		immagine/image: to-image load news/immagine
	]

I have tried this code too:

	if not error? [picture: to-image load news/immagine] [
		immagine/image: to-image load news/immagine
	]
However I get the following error:

Script Error: Invalid argument: make image! [170x78 #{
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF...
** Where: to-image
** Near: to image! :value

The error is generated from the block following the IF

Why I am not able to catch the wrong image ?

Now I have another problem: I have a "description" text field I get 
from internet and it is "untagged".  The field is very long.

When I update the field with an empty string in VID I get strange 
characters.

It seemd that when the size of the text returns to 0 the text area 
is not correctly updated and some characthers are being taken from 
memory.

Here is some info:
http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-face-object.html


A block that holds text line information. This block is created, 
updated, and used by the system to optimize the updating of text. 
When you modify large areas of text (greater than 200 characters) 
you should set this variable to zero to force the system to recompute 
the positions of all lines. If you do not, you may see garbage characters 
appearing within the text.

However I use RebDB to retrieve the text and it returns an empty 
string

Next level !

Any suggestion about creating a dynamic built GUI ? I whish to create 
a GUI from a Block of data, each data is a button and each button 
has an action attached to it.
Could you please point me to some code to analize?
Thanks in advance

Giuseppe, you can experiment by creating your gui code as a block 
and then "do" it. Then view it.
a: [layout [button "hi" [print "hello"]]]
b: do a
view b

BrianH: Thanks for the info. It corrupts when I try it on objects. 
And wierd effects on blocks.. I've added "unset 'path" to my rebol.r 
file, so I won't be confused anymore.

Let us know whether you find that it's safe to unset 'path and reuse 
it for other stuff. There's no reason to think that the action! mechanism 
would call the function through its name (that's more of an R3 intrinsics 
thing), but any unpredictable behavior you find would be good to 
know.

Keep asking questions Giuseppe. Dynamic GUIs is a big subject, so 
if you ask more specific questions, that makes it easier to craft 
small answers and examples.

Perhaps it helps to learn about the mechanisms: There are several 
ways to generate a dynamic UI:


The LAYOUT function works by creating an object tree, a tree of faces 
that are simply ordinary objects. When passing this to the VIEW function, 
a layout is displayed. The layout function is part of VID and is 
as such a high level function. VIEW is a low level function to interpret 
the face tree.


The face tree consists of objects that contain other objects through 
the FACE/PANE word. If the FACE/PANE contains an object, that object 
is a single face, that is displayed inside the parent face. If the 
PANE contains a block, that block may contain multiple objects that 
are simply multiple faces. As such, a typical window is a face with 
a FACE/PANE that is a block that contains other objects.


Graphically, the face is represented by a region on the screen that 
has the size and offset, possibly an effect, such as coloring, blur 
or mirroring or a text attached to it, and image or other faces that 
are only visible inside that region.

A window is also a face.


To navigate to the parent face from a face, use the FACE&/PARENT-FACE 
word. Note that FACE/PARENT-FACE is many times not set by VID, which 
is sometimes problematic.


You can manipulate the face tree by adding removing objects dynamically 
and calling the SHOW function. You can also change values in existing 
face objects in the tree, such as for resizing or moving the faces 
and then calling SHOW again. You can also build a face tree entirely 
by hand, and this is usually the starting point for different layout 
engines, such as RebGUI, that simply build face trees in their own 
way.


The prototype face is FACE, which is a minimum requirement face for 
the View engine. The prototype face for a VID face, which contains 
a few more words, is SYSTEM/VIEW/VID/VID-FACE, which is the minimum 
requirement face for VID.


One condition for the face tree is to not use the same object in 
multiple locations. The VIEW or SHOW function will return an error 
if that is the case.


A simpler way is also to generate a new face tree every time you 
want to change the layout. Although this is slightly more computationally 
heavy, it allows you to manipulate the block that was passed to the 
LAYOUT function instead of manipulating the face tree directly. This 
technique is best used, when the face tree changes dramatically by 
each manipulation.


Another important concept is the DRAW engine which is a separate 
entity in REBOL2. It can be called to draw on an image bitmap, using 
the DRAW function or as in effect for a face object, by adding a 
parameter in the VID dialect block or by changing the FACE/EFFECT 
word. DRAW is used by calling a dialect. if you just want to use 
fields, buttons and simple user interface designs, you may not need 
to use DRAW.

I should add that it is possible for FACE/PANE also to be a function. 
This makes the face into an iterated face, where using a loop, you 
can "stamp" the face in various positions during a single SHOW, making 
it possible to use one face  with different texts, sizes and offsets 
to produce a grid or a table.

You can do this by adding the buttons to a panel and update the contents 
of this panel.


view/new layout [p: panel 500x500 []] ; start with an empty panel. 
note that VID does not support scrolling panels out-of-the-box. For 
this you need the VID Extension Kit.

append p/pane make get-style 'button [] ; you will need to adjust 
for offset here, otherwise the new phase will be placed on top of 
the old one.

do in last p/pane 'init ; you will need to initialize the face, which 
is the FACE/INIT block that resides in the face style definition. 
once the init block has been run, the face will set itself up and 
then you can show it

show p

This is just a simple version of what can be done.

To clear it again:

clear p
show p


If you want to do more than this, I think you need to use the VID 
Extension Kit, because you will be spending a lot of time managing 
scrollbars and panels. It has styles that are meant for this purpose.

If it's inserting whitespace according to the first line I'm afraid 
there isn't such functionality available out-of-the-box. And if there 
was, TRIM wouldn't probably be a good name for it, then ;-)

Hello, all. I am new to REBOL4 and while having followed Lava to 
REBOL and looked through tutorials every year once a year for more 
than 10 years I have only recently began making an actual REBOL script.

I hope it is not rude to leave a question here as opposed to be here 
for the disucssion live, ala IRC. Please forgive me if so, and if 
so I will ask again when others are present. I will break down my 
script into smaller part questions as time goes on. First thing, 
I am under the impression that if I can generate a random number 
between 1 and 1 billion and assign this result to an aribtray variable 
word like so

token: random/secure 1000000000


I want to email my newly generated random number to someone. So I 
thought of this:

send [person-:-example-:-com] "Thank you. Your number is token."


One second later I realized that will just the send the actial word 
token, not the number the variabkle word token represents.

Is the above a correct way to generate a random number?


How do I insert that random number into the body of the text of an 
email to send someone? (send [person-:-example-:-com] "Thank you. Your 
number is [token]" maybe?)


 Thanks for your help in advance, apologies for any breach of rules 
 or etiquette. 
etiquetteetiquette

You need to seed the random generator first eg. with the datestamp 
or something, and then generate your random number.  But a better 
way is to create a UUID if you want something guaranteed to be unique.

The library has code for windows http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=guid.r

Just using random, something like this should work

random/seed form now/precise


send [person-:-example-:-com] rejoin [ "Thank you. Your number is " random/secure 
1000000  "." ]

even the simplest questions are good to keep our memories intact, 
and I've learned quite a few things when trying to respond to some 
seemingly simple questions (often by looking at other people's innovative 
answers).

And don't wait for people to be online. One of the great things about 
AltMe is the async nature.

Thank you all for addressing my concerns and for your answers about 
my first coding question.


Ahh.. rejoin. Reading up on it makes me better understand how some 
things are to be done in Rebol.

 Continuing to the final goal...


I have to extract an email address from a GET transfer. The methoed 
of sending the info to me is completely out of my control. An email 
address will be entered into a form on a website not controled by 
me. GET methoed will send the data to my script. The people who created 
the form on the external site advised that they label the email address 
as "trnEmailAddress".


 So now I want to see if I am correct in thinking how to extract and 
 use the email address. Will using the decode a cgi form command (I 
 know they are not commands in the tradiational sense)  work. How 
 does it work, does it create variables out of the GET (or Post when 
 using Post, but I am forced to recieve the info via GET) stream?


The GET stream in my case will include "&trnEmailAddress=person%40example%2Ecom. 
So can I do this?

decode-cgi system/options/cgi/query-string

send trnEmailAddress "Thank you. Rest of message." 

Thanks for your help.

Sunanda: Thanks again for issuing the World invitation. Everyone 
thanks for the continuing help.


I have read the cited document, but it just leaves me with more questions.

Is the following literal?

cgi-string: read-cgi
cgi-block: decode-cgi cgi-string
cgi-obj: make object! cgi-block 


 That is to say should I type exactly that? Or is cgi-string for example 
 a theoretical variable assignment that I could call anything? Are 
 they all proper commands, or is any part of that just for example 
 purposes?  I am thinking I should copy and paste it verbatium. I 
 am also thinking I mispelt verbatum.


 I am stuck with GET. Does this mean I can leave out some code that 
 makes up for  not knowing if the original data is POST vs GET? These 
 are hypothetical questions for better long term learning. I for now 
 will go with the idea that everything is as straight fowarrd as it 
 seems. I know that my GET stream will have "trnEmailAddress" in it 
 which is a field that will contains an email address.


 So will the following  generate a random number, extract the address 
 and email the same random number to that email address?

token: random/seed now/percise

cgi-string: read-cgi
cgi-block: decode-cgi cgi-string
cgi-obj: make object! cgi-block 


send trnEmailAddress rejoin [ "Thank you. Your number is" token "." 
]


 Graham: Thank you for the extra info on GUID, but Windows is not 
 involved here. I realize that random number generating really isn't 
 unless you have a monkey throwing darts at a numbered board. Regardless 
 extra effort to 
make a number unique is useful and your advice appreciated. 


 I do not think the corner cases will come up and the people who control 
 the original form assured me that web page issues warnings if the 
 form is not filled out correct which should help. I do realize that 
 people are idiots, systems are not fool proof, etc. What I am saying 
 is my basic needs are basic and I should be OK so I am not fretting 
 over those examples. It is great though to know the solutions are 
 out there when I need them.

 Tahnks.

John you have to seed the generator first and then generate your 
number
And you can dispense with the cgi-string by 

cg-block: make object! decode-cgi read-cgi

cgi-block is your variable, and the rest are functions

Thanks guys. Endo: Special thanks for  going so far as type out an 
example that includes checking out that everything is OK.


 I realize that one cannot trust outside sources of info and that 
 one has to always be prepared to outsmart dumb users, but the needs 
 of this project are straightdforward and I am in unfamilar territory 
 so if it can make things easier I can go on a bit of faith for now. 
 That being said, better code that covers mistakes is better code 
 and I am appreciative of it.


 Sunanda: That is what I thought, but I had to be sure. Thanks for 
 helping with the details.


 Graham: Is that general advice or a comment on code examples I posted? 
 I thought I had done what you just said.

Hi, I have a small problem playing an mp3 file 
I have so far
player: "/Applications/Vox.app/Contents/MacOS/Vox"
thissong: "/Users/Arnold/Music/A song.mp3" 
thatsong: "/Users/Arnold/Music/A-song.mp3"       
And then 
call reform [player thissong]  
call reform [player thatsong] 

Playing thissong will start the musicplayer, but no music was found 
and playing  thatsong starts the player and is being played without 
problem.

Because most of my mp3's and directories they are in have spaces 
in their names so starting to play them from REBOL gets hard this 
way.

I tried to-file thissong but this produces "%/......&20song.mp3" 
so it was not successful. (Allthough thatsong just played without 
a problem) :(
Any ideas please?

Another thing, I want to make an 'application' using REBOL that plays 
an mp3, an mp3 with a story for kids and I want to display the pictures 
from the book depending on maybe a timer(file) so the pictures are 
displayed acoording to the storyline. This also could be a helping 
aid for making presentations. 

I do not want to binary save my mp3 in the source of the application 
or in any other rebol-script so I just want to use the mp3 file and 
not convert it.

Furthermore I do not want an external app to be started unless it 
can be done under the hood and/or it can be controlled by my app 
because the presentation could be paused by the user. Any ideas where 
and how to start such script.

Yet another task I think REBOL could help me with. Say I could not 
find the subtitles for an ancient tv-series i stumbled upon on the 
net. But I found subtitles in English. I can translate but some words 
will reoccur often, so I imagine a rebol script showing an original 
line or words to be translated. I type some translations and when 
I translate a word, all equal words in the rest of the document will 
change, saving me quite some time.

Okay now the words are almost all translated. Unfortunately the words 
are in the wrong order. Now the app shows me the lines again and 
this time the words are little blocks that I can click and drag to 
the desired position.

Found the answer to my first task:

Had to read the documentation a little further and needed a function 
localize-file: func [file] [
    rejoin [{"} to-local-file clean-path file {"}]
]

Now call reform [player localize-file to-file thissong] does play 
the song!

@JohnM

You have to do it like this

random/seed now/precise
token: random/secure 1000000

and not like this

token: random/seed now/precise

Graham: Thanks. That makes sense out of something someone else told 
me. I thought the information was contradicting what you guys said 
earlier, it just means I misunderstood the order of things. The modiffer 
after the slash is closer to making a new command than it is an agrument 
than I had envisioned. The fact that random is part of both made 
me think they could be done together. Thank you for catching that 
I did not know that detail.


 Next part of myscrip enters something into a database. The server 
 will have an mySQL database installed. It is possible that alternative 
 could be used, but knowing for sure I have at no extra charge this 
 options means I am starting with this option.


 So I found a MySQL Driver for REBOL from here: http://softinnov.org/rebol/mysql.shtml


 I am following the instructions that came with the download. Is there 
 anything I should know. Maybe it is not the driver people use because 
 there are better ones. Maybe the author kills kittens on the weekend 
 and it is consider bad form to use it. Maybe it is harder than it 
 looks. Basically, please just tell me if there is general info about 
 it I should know that is not obvious. Thanks.


Hey, someone else is asking questions? i thought this was all about 
me! :-) :-)

On filename quoting, I have an ENQUOTE func (and a more generic ENCLOSE, 
ENCLOSED?, etc.) to make the intent clear. MOLD is shorter, but if 
you pass things around, not knowing if they've already been molded, 
you can get tripped up. At least I have.

The principle is that the token calculated that way:

1) depends only on now/precise, in fact

2) since there are the is the RANDOM/SEED and RANDOM calls, it is 
still possible that in some cases distinct NOW/PRECISE results lead 
to the same TOKEN value

Today I tried combining some tables in Excel, but without (frustrating!) 
no success. So tomorrow I will try and build a quicky REBOL script 
to put the data in one Rebdb databasetable and then do a dump of 
that and import that again in Excel.

So I combine data NAME PROP1 with NAME PROP2 giving a table NAME 
PROP1 PROP2
Any tips suggestions for lookalike scripts? Tia!

Arnold, you can also take a look at an .xml file that Excel produces 
and see how that is configured. I've had better success with xml 
files than csv (though I use those as well) since you can add all 
kinds of formatting with XML.

@kaj and balance-line through the files. A possibility, has some 
tricky attentionpoints in it, and the preferred way when efficiency 
is in the picture or more than once usage. Db seems to be pretty 
straight forward and its a nice exercise in using that.
Thanks Endo, I mailed the links to my work.

@James To me xml just looks like a whole lot of <> characters and 
a lot of description extra. Having to deal with that too seems a 
lot of work more, need a tool for  working quick with xml.
Thank you for all of your suggestions!

I had the cvs file (one at a time is easiest) read/lines, parsed 
the comma's and then depending on the record with the key name = 
currentrecname being already in the table an insert or an update. 
But the update using db-update/where just gave me trouble beyond 
belief. Trying update within SQL (I am talking about Rebdb here) 
was no problem at least using 1 property at a time (had no more time 
testing). But how to do it using db-update is a mystery to me. Tried 
many things to no avail. My table I created using db-create bt [name 
additive papertype department weight weightline]   How do I update 
the record where name = ABCD and I need only to update columns weight 
and weigthline, both integer (but that's a coincidence, don't mind 
if it could be anything)?

And I thought this would be a quicky! :-)

After some trial and error getting surprised with some thing that 
seemed to work yeterday but didn't today I got it figured out. I 
will post the scripts somewhere when there is interest in it.

A view question. Can the name of a button be changed after it has 
been created?

view layout [button "Text in Button"]


I want to change "Text in Button" to "New Text in Button" and redisplay 
it. I have not come across this anywhere so far?

When I use rename function to rename a file, the file date on my 
Mac OS X changes too. When I change a name using finder, carefully 
clicking the file and renaming it, the date does not change. Doe 
sthis happen on other platforms too? How to steer this behaviour?

You can use rebol to get the mod date and change it back after the 
move

I got an idea from a friend. So I got ready to start my two scripts 
(maybe someone wrote smth similar???) - one window; left pane has 
file system folders tree with top at the script's dir, right pane 
has some content. I want two scripts, every of them is a standalone 
app for its own like-minded audience: 1) plaintext.r, and 2) activetext.r. 
The plaintext.r will have right pane editor for plain text, saving 
it on the fly while editing (when the window is navigated away or 
closed, the text is saved); and activetext.r which has a plaintext-with-rebol-applets 
or .r content at the right pane.

Well. The activetext.r script will have plaintext-with-embedded-rebol 
applets. And the rtext.r will have .r content at the right pane.

Activetext and rtext will have editor and viewer on the right, however 
plaintext.r will have only editor.

hmm. How to display a tree of folders and files in REBOL???

If you do want to leave out the </br> and </div> substrings, the 
simplest way probably is:

s1: "a http://xxx</div>b http://yyy</br>"

parse/all s1 [any [to "http://"start: any [end: </br> break | </div> 
break | skip] (print copy/part start end)]]

I use Artisteer to prototype web pages, and it saves content in UTF-8. 
Later on, I need to do few adaptations to such generated pages, so 
I opened it in R2, reparsed, inserted some stuff, deleted other, 
but it did not work out ....

Use some external tool to convert it to ANSI, do adaptations, and 
covert it back to UTF-8?

I am trying now. I somehow lost interest in R3, as it is non-finished, 
and dead product. But probably still easier than to use iconv together 
with R2, although I did it in the past that way, using CALL

I mean - text I need to input into the resulting file (UTF-8) is 
ANSI. I do print to-string read %text-slider.html, and in R3 console, 
Czech text is not correct ....

in editor, it's correct. Simply put - I read czech text from an ansi 
file, and it is distorted in console, ditto when writing it back 
to file of course ....

When you cut and paste it from the console, or when you write it 
with REBOL?

Guiseppe: "I am not ablie to understand the use of Break. Why it 
is useful ?"
I'll try to explain:

>> parse/all "http://a.txthttp://b.dat"[any [to "http://"copy 
x any [".txt" | ".dat" | skip] (print x)]]

http://a.txthttp://b.dat;it prints just one line, from the first 
http:// to the last .dat


>> parse/all "http://a.txthttp://b.dat"[any [to "http://"copy 
x any [".txt" break | ".dat" break | skip] (print x)]]

http://a.txt;now it works as expected, from http:// to .txt 
and breaks
http://b.dat;and from the next http:// to .dat

Guiseppe: "Could it be written as: ..."
TO ANY doesn't work.
but ANY [TO "..." BREAK | TO "..." BREAK] works.

just be careful using ANY and TO together, because they both don't 
advance the series pointer. So you can easily put the console in 
an infinit loop (escape key also doesn't work)

hmm.. links look weird in AltME, select all text, copy and paste 
to a text editor to see it correctly.

Petr, R3 can't decode any 8bit encodings with its built-in code, 
just ASCII (which is 7bit) and UTF-8. However, its binary handling 
is better so it should be easy to write your own converters. For 
R2, I would suggest looking at Gabriele's PowerMezz package; it has 
some great text converters. Of course you lose out on R3's PARSE 
if you use R2.

Rebolek - thanks, I forgot about it. I needed it only once in the 
past, and so I used iconv command line tool  via CALL ....

End I have tried. Exchanging the position of .txt and .dat I have 
only a single line. How it could be solved ?

Also in the second example why there isn't a 

end:" before "</div> break" ?" - it is because the first END: was 
already used and the position is remembered. (however, you can use 
end: twice if you like)

Finally, which is the purpose of the SKIP keywork in this context 
?
 - that is the easiest question. The expression

    any [end: </div> break | </br> break | skip]


simply checks whether it "sees" the </div> terminator. If it does 
then the search for the terminator is over. If it does not then we 
check immediately whether we do not "see" the second possible terminator. 
However, if we are not at the terminator, both alternatives fail 
and the third alternative has to advance to the next position to 
be able to finally find the terminator.

Arnold: I believe that Rebol/View uses Windows Codepages under Windows, 
MacRoman on OS X and ISO-8859-1 on  Linux. Sadly this means it only 
really supports true ASCII characterrs cross platform unless you 
manage encoding your self.

Ladislav, some questions are still open. I am currently remotely 
connected to my machine. I'll study your "lesson" tomorrow and I'll 
reply.

Peter, seeing your conversion routine on rebol.org, you know the 
ins and outs ;-)

All the special ones I need are in the next 127. On the windows they 
show up. That's one of the points to be taken into account for Red 
development.

And knowing even this small community has less members then the diacrits 
they are using in everyday living it is a requirement to deal with 
UTF-8 UCS or other encodings.

Because all of the to-somedatatypeword functions are specifically 
only for datatype conversion, and we don't have a dir! or directory! 
type.

What are your status re: strict rebol clone and plans about it?

I currently read his blog. I am also liker of Robert Piersig's books, 
and that's fantastic about Brian...

Evegeniy: I will contact Brian and give him your email address.

I have a problem renaming files. rename does not change the filename 
on MacOSx. In the terminal it is no problem but in my script the 
filenames are not changed.

            fileo: to-file rejoin [what-dir add-suffix naam-oud-z-ext extensie]
            filen: to-file add-suffix naam-oud-z-ext extensie
            rename fileo filen

I have tested with probe that the types are ok and with the resulting 
values for fileo and filen the rename command worked like a charm. 
Any more ideas what is happening and how to debug this further? Thanks.

In the original script I use a change-dir to get into the right directory. 
Then renaming is just the rename filename newname. I stuffed the 
renaming into a function and changed the variable names. Everywhere 
but in this place where I wanted to rename the file for real and 
I forgot to change old to new.... so here I tried debugging it while 
using the complete path and filename, because I was afraid there 
could be an issue there.

If the number of texts doesn't vary, it might be simpler to make 
the fields manually instead of using an iterated face. The reason 
for this is that you need to write the SUPPLY code yourself, which 
will run every time you run the code and will run on every mouse 
move, if your text has a FEEL object with ENGAGE, OVER or DETECT 
functions, whereas simply making 8 texts once with VID is both faster 
and requires less code.

I wrote another function which returns in the above format, so I 
can SELECT/SKIP 2,  to get the number of occurence of the value, 
and it doesn't use SORT, uses REMOVE-EACH instead.
it:


>> f: func [b /local c r n1 n2] [r: copy [] foreach v unique b [c: 
copy b n1: length? c remove-each w c [v = w] n2: length? c append 
r reduce [v n1 - n2]] r]
>> a: [a b c c a a b b c d d e e e f f h f f g h]
>> f a
== [a 3 b 3 c 3 d 2 e 3 f 4 h 2 g 1]

Interesting, my tally function and Joel's, work almost in same speed, 
53 sec. for 1 million execution for both.

just found a very handy idiom ( not new, just rarely discussed and 
possibly missed by many ):

help function!


this lists all known functions in the global scope (same for     
help native!    help action!)


obviously you can do this for all datatypes, so its very handy to 
get the names of stuff you often forget, like the internal color 
names (help  tuple! )

Interesting, my tally function and Joel's, work almost in same speed, 
53 sec. for 1 million execution for both.
 - I guess that the version using SORT should be much faster.

Aha, I checked and Joel's code actually *is* using SORT, which means 
it is O(n * log n) algorithm. While, at the same time, the above 
REMOVE-EACH is O(n * n), which is *much* slower as far as I am concerned.

(Search for fast-tally in Altme groups)
using the unique trick:
fast-tally: func [b [block!] /local u i] [
	b: sort b
	u: unique b
	i: 1
	until [
		b: any [find b u/2 tail b]
		u/1: as-pair u/1 negate i - i: index? b
		tail? u: next u
	]
	head u
]

And also, the radix algo is pretty good (if the max value is not 
too large)
radix: func [b [block!] /local u maxv] [
	maxv: 0
	foreach v b [maxv: max maxv v]
	u: head insert/dup make block! maxv 0 maxv
	foreach v b [
		u/:v: u/:v + 1
	]
	u
]

...and its speed cannot exceed the speed of more universal tallies 
in a significant way

For example my Smasung Galaxy mini phone :-) AFAIK these low-ends 
are owned by a lot of people who doesn't have big enough pockets 
to handle the much bigger, expensive and powerful ones.