AltME groups: search

The OS and other apps are also resident. Anything over 512MB would 
push things on a 2GB system running OSX.. I wish my main system was 
running - it has 4GB, which is plenty even on Win7.

Yes, but R3 is 32 bits, so its address space is at most 4 GB and 
could be 2 GB if for example one bit of the address is used as a 
flag

Disqualifying that ticket and blog :)

2 Andreas:  2 ** 26 limit is hardcoded into checksum/hash function 
IMO, this hash function is used for calculating respective key hashes 
in map! datatype I think, nevertheless this hashing is pretty fast 
and could be used in in-file hashes, there the limit can be theoretically 
limiting. But still 2 ** 26 hash table is pretty huge indeed.

For 2**25 and 2**26 hash table sizes the hash function gives different 
hash numbers, so I think the limit is 2**26 (sorry I missed your 
observation few lines before you are right off course)

Does anyone have any information / Documentation on how to invoke 
a separate R2 program from R3 and/or vice versa?  In other words, 
is it possible to have an R3 script running and start up a separate 
instance of another R2 and/or R3 program to complete some tasks and 
then resume the original script?


Is it possible to time the event to run in a pre-determined amount 
of time?  Say like 5 seconds for the second program to run, if not, 
then show some error message.


What, if any, communications can occur between the programs, passing 
arguments, blocks, files, urls, etc.

You can do that with CALL and communicate via TCP.

Great... and it is possible in R2 as well.. I'm still learning:)

Oldes - AFAIK, codecs are going to be completly overhauled. We wanted 
streaming support, and current implementation is imo rather primitive. 
Carl agreed in one roadmap document release, but that file is gone 
(we are waiting for new one). I hope proper port based API will be 
available. So - on one hand it is a good thing it is not part of 
the host-kit, as we arelly need one standardised API, not myriad 
of different hack-ins, but otoh Carl could benefit from some community 
experiments in that regards ....

you use a lot the old idiom
select block 'word 
vs
block/:word (which is faster and more compact)

V1 and V2 are actually integers

We use that IF or UNLESS returning none trick a lot. It is used so 
much that it might as well be considered explicit. It is good to 
remember that REBOL doesn't have an optimizer; we have to optimize 
by hand, and the IF trick is faster than the explicit EITHER.

Agreed on optimization being required at times. Not loading lots 
of data? Yes. Using a hash instead of a block? Yes. I have even avoided 
the mezz loop constructs at times, though more often for clarity 
than performance. 


Maybe I'm a special case, but I have rarely found the need to optimize 
my REBOL code for performance at this level. And I can safely say 
I have never ever, ever optimized out EITHER for IF. Since you said 
it's used a lot, what code should I look at to see how and why? I'm 
always happy to see what I've been missing.

It's used in mezzanines, for instance. I tend to just write code 
in micro-optimized form in the first place, since it is easy to do 
and saves you the trouble of doing it later. Even if you are macro-optimizing 
the code (refactoring and such) you tend to use the same micro-optimizations 
in the new code. For that matter, many of the changes and enhancements 
in R3 were done to make micro-optimized code cleaner to read and 
write than they are in R2. But I mostly write library and mezzannine 
code nowadays, so micro-optimization has greater impact than it would 
for user-level code.

Agreed: Less code means less code to maintain and debug :)

I tend to just write code in micro-optimized form in the first place

And do you consider that premature optimization, or not?

I understand, but at the start of that, REBOL was a ten years old 
project, and a thirty years old design

That's nice, I like that much better, and certainly more robust path 
evaluation

We don't have that anymore since a while, both in R2 and R3.

I posted a note on Geany as a possible linux rebol tool in IDE as 
Carl's Rebol Blog is no place for running notes - but altme cannot 
tag a topic ?  And trying to select a group here on linux as ALTme 
1.2.25 is loading is just a crap shoot - highlight and click and 
close yore eyes or is it the reverse?

Ladislav - The following sentence implies that there is an internal 
NaN:
 

The exponent value 2047 is reserved for overflow and NaN (Not a Number)

The primary reason for supporting NaNs would be for easy of interaction 
with systems that do support NaN, eg Oracle.


Right now, any REBOL system that was trying to trade values with 
an Oracle system that supported NaN and +/-INF would need to code 
for special cases.


However, I do not know of anyone who has such a need -- so time for 
some to make the busines case!

IIRC, the NaN stuff is mostly necessary in assembler and on the hardware 
level to trigger an exception and somehow report back a problem. 
If any layer now handles this exception it's not necessary to further 
bubble it upwards to interpreters, user scripts etc.

Many languages are implemented using C. If you don't do anything 
particular regarding NaNs, you get outputs like from this C program:

#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
	printf ("%lf\n", sqrt (1.0));
	printf ("%lf\n", sqrt (-1.0));
	printf ("%lf\n", sqrt (2.0));
}

Output:

1.000000
nan
1.414214


So it may actually take more effort to grab the NaN output and make 
e.g. an error output. Like REBOL does:

>> square-root -1
** Math Error: Positive number required
** Near: square-root -1

Pharo Smalltalk implements two methods as    isNaN    but has no 
such class  and  I no longer see NotANumber in Cincom Visual Works 
Smalltalk so that covers a new Smalltalk implementation ( Pharo )and 
a very mature implementation ( VW ).  Two recent languages to check: 
might be Falcon and Io ( falcon is not yet 1.0 at falconpl.org )

guys, 2010 is almost finished, and R3 is still not there ;-( ....................but 
happy new year  anyway .................

Hope 2011 will bring us GUI; SQLite, REBDB and other databases connection; 
many tickets closed. I don't ask for more.

I hope Carl re-appears refreshed, and defines the beta-list. I wish 
for device extensions, user types,  tasking, timers, new codec system, 
network schemes :-)

yes, when doing a make string! 10000, the space is preallocated. 
this helps the garbage collector to collect quicker and also speeds 
up operations on the string when its expanding in size.

and, of course, when no reallocation occurs, no content movement 
is necessary

there were several discussions about the topic. Carl stated, that 
R2 code was very complex, and is willing to provide source for adaptation. 
After some complaint, we got /wait at least. I think that for now 
you have to use call/wait, output to file, and read the file ....

Remembering the function naming discussion from the !REBOL3 GUI group 
and seeing the 

http://curecode.org/rebol3/ticket.rsp?id=667&cursor=1#comments

I could not help but point out:


As I see it, not using the question mark *is* violating a naming 
principle that was explicitly stated. I know, that in REBOL we don't 
have to be that rigid, but, when we have explicitly stated a principle, 
we *should* stick to it. ( http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/concepts/scripts-style.html#section-10
)

The we should stick to principles. But I am not sure even Carl himself 
is strictly following the rules. In his doc he claims, that 'quit 
is as clear, as quit-system. Well, we have 'do, and we have 'do-browser, 
'do-service, where we are breaking on encapsulation rules, with excuses 
to not polutu 'do's name-space (not complicating it - because in 
other words, the proper way is to use refinements, as do-browser 
could be do/browser as well)


What is a bit tricky about question marks is, that the meaning is 
not clear enough,e.g. - modified? Does it stand for the logic value, 
returning the true or false, or does it stand for the return of modification 
date? How should user know?


That is just my opinion on this topic - sometimes things are not 
easy to sort-out. Rules are rules, and we should probably stick to 
them ... the other thing is, if we are not forgetting another rebol 
"rule" (or at least principle) - make things pop-out to your mind 
at first sight, if possible. So - what is more self-explanatory - 
faces?, or get-faces (or what was the suggestion alternative)?

The points you made are intelligent and need a discussion, so, here 
goes:

'quit vs. 'quit-system and 'do vs. 'do-browse: Carl just pointed 
out, that if the -system part was unnecessary, it shouldn't have 
been used. That is clearly not the case of 'do vs. 'do-browse, where 
the second part cannot be seen as unnecessary

Well, I think I know why we went with do-*, open-* - simply to not 
overload those functions with refinements, and hence slowing them 
down ...

(even the doc string may be insufficient, and an online documentation 
should be consulted in some cases)

And, in fact, it is a C naming convention, except for the fact, that 
in C it would need to be faces_of

One of the possible solutions is to just add the *-of as an alternative 
convention, and have the option to choose. The only problem remaining 
is, that it uses two words instead of one.

What is interesting (and surprising me), is the fact, that, not reading/remembering 
the REBOL function naming convention, lots of people immediately 
were able to define any kinds of "ad hoc rules" which (purportedly) 
were in effect in Rebol for function naming, and used that as their 
argument why their preferred name was in accordance with the REBOL 
function naming convention.

Yes, a convention, not a low cut out in stone, and we already established 
that only a select subset of standard words conforms to it

it is hard to use a logic argument when you refuse to discern nouns 
from other words, but, in that case, you are unable to stick to the 
function naming convention anyway, and I don't know what do you want 
to discuss

Cats and dogs are nouns

To begin with, I never liked faces-of or faces? proposals.
faces
 should be enough.
Plural means that it returns a serie of faces.

It may be a static list (reference) or a constructed one (function), 
I don't bother.
The context give all the hints I need.
*-of is a lame and useless convention.

Because a property or a method is always the relative "-of" something 
else .

Ladislav, I'm just asking you how your interpretation works, and 
you said it applies to nouns

Are you saying, that you are unable to read the rule, and see, that 
it applies to nouns?

A noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing, and 
abstract idea. Nouns are usually the first words which small children 
learn. The highlighted words in the following sentences are all nouns:

    Late last *year* our *neighbours* bought a *goat*.
    *Portia* *White* was an *opera* *singer*.

    The *bus* *inspector* looked at all the *passengers*' *passes*.

    According to *Plutarch*, the *library* at *Alexandria* was destroyed 
    in 48 B.C.
    *Philosophy* is of little *comfort* to the *starving*.

For other people, just to make sure they understand even if they 
don't remember the wording of the http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/concepts/scripts-style.html#section-10
convention:


- the convention applies *only* to function names, not to the REBOL 
words in general

- when picking a name for a function, any candidate is not a name 
yet, it is just a word/words, and it can be examined, whether it 
is a noun or not
- etc.

Most REBOL words hold functions, so what's the difference? And with 
all words, it's impossible to tell from the lexical notation if it's 
a function or not

Using a question mark on LENGTH doesn't tell you that DO, PRINT and 
GET are functions

words of breaks this convetion since it starts with an noun and isn't 
followed by a special char... I think that is the only point Ladislav 
is trying to make !!?!?

...and since it does not introduce any ambiguities when added, as 
far as I am able to find out

The documentation would make a stronger case if it wouldn't confuse 
nouns and verbs

By definition, when this situation occurs in human language, we say 
that the word can be used as both a noun and a verb, with different 
grammar and semantics

the issue is that  'length is the function, not  'of  

and length is not a verb, this is very confusing.

To make that explicit, you could use size-up for the verb and size-of 
for the noun

Of course, you could also use <verb>size</verb> and <noun>size</noun>

if you are saying "I do not want to respect the REBOL function naming 
convention" then I don't want to change your mind in that. But, I 
think, that a reasonable naming convention is of advantage, and the 
one Carl wrote looks good enough to me.

Because when I got back to home, it feels like arguing :-) i know 
we are discussing consistency here, and I am the first one who always 
screams when something is feeling inconsistent, but - I would 100 
times prefer Carl being back, ending his 2-3 months R3 black-out 
period, instead of caring, if one function is going to be called 
faces-of, or faces?, because in the end the discussion started because 
of that. And even more - whatever we think, will have to be agreed 
by Carl anyway ...

I am not disrespecting the REBOL function naming convention, I am 
respecting REBOL's founding principle and trying to make you see 
that it means that things are context dependent, instead of black 
and white

Analysing conventions in current naming of standard REBOL functions 
(that is, the practice instead of the documentation about the practice) 
two conventions can be seen in R2 and now three conventions in R3

The simplest, most abstract and thus most flexible convention is 
to use a word as-is, just like in English. As you observed, this 
applies to the math functions, for example, such as SINE

R3 has added a third convention with just a few examples to date, 
such as words-of and body-of

This makes it clear that there is a reason not to use the ? for all 
these cases, because otherwise they could have been WORDS? and BODY?

It seems reasonable to me to assume that R2 only used ? because there 
weren't many cases yet, and this seemed consistent. But with more 
cases now, consistency is being lost, so this may not have been the 
greatest idea

In hindsight, I think it would have been better to have DATATYPE? 
be just TYPE? so that it is consistent with the other <type>? functions, 
and to have TYPE? be TYPE-OF

Not because "property of?" is a wrong question, but because a REBOL 
program is full of such evaluations. So if you would use ? consistently, 
every expression would be full of question marks, whereas in human 
language it only marks the end of a complete sentence (and the beginning 
in Spanish)

Yes, so not consistent according to your black and white interpretation

In many cases when you ask a question in human language, you want 
to make a decision. So I associate a question mark in REBOL with 
control flow, and would thus rather limit the ? qualifier to logic 
values

You're the one who wants to make the convention black and white, 
not me

I do want to respect the convention when possible, and, frankly, 
you cannot do anything about my will in that respect

The current convention works for me, but I don't think of it in verb/noun 
terms but question/non-question terms.


 length? and none? are both questions, whether they return a logic! 
 or not can be deduced by their name(s) ... ("What is the length?" 
 versus "Is this a none value?")

A question must return a logic, none or scalar value.


The best we can say about non-questions is that they generally "do" 
or change something.

In the case of your faces question, "faces" is a collective noun, 
and in function form is a request for a property or contents of its 
argument (don't know which), so FACES-OF would probably be preferred, 
leaving the 'faces word available to be used as a variable. Or GET-FACES 
if you prefer to emphasize the action of retrieving that value and 
have a corresponding SET-FACES function.

Some *? functions that might be better off as *-OF: ENCODING?, FILE-TYPE?, 
INDEX?, LENGTH?, SIGN? and SIZE?. Except for the first two the old 
names would need to stick around because of the legacy naming rules. 
Strangely enough, UTF? is OK because it is short for "UTF what?". 
The series contents functions have an implicit -OF :)

INFO? is iffy because "info" is not an adjective and makes a poor 
question word, but it can be used in a conditional context (it returns 
none if there is no info) and the legacy naming rule applies so it's 
probably not worth adding INFO-OF.

And HEAD and TAIL can still have -OF be implicit too, IMO.

This is one of those weird circumstances where I know the answer 
to the question because I was there when the original decision was 
made. The reflectors (the *-OF functions that call REFLECT) were 
my idea in the first place, as a security measure, though obviously 
Carl wrote them and came up with the nouns :)

this naming convention doesn't work with MAXIMUM-OF and MINIMUM-OF, 
which don't actually return the maximum or minimum of a series, they 
return the series at the position of the maximum or minimum. Gregg 
has suggested that these be renamed to FIND-MAX and FIND-MIN instead, 
and this will probably happen (rarely used, really badly named). 

 - I have got absolutely no problem with MAXIMUM-OF or MINIMUM-OF, 
 FIND-MAX and FIND-MIN aren't any better, because they express the 
 same, just in a less fortunate way (find is less descriptive than 
 maximum/minimum)

It is a good idea to only use noun-of for intrinsic properties, rather 
than contents of container types.

 - it looks to me that you suggest, that for you, the preferable way 
 is:

    faces? face

, and not

    faces-of face


As far as I am concerned, I used the convention as written now, but, 
probably, the majority of users prefer the latter.

I do not think, that the name of a function should describe everything, 
so, if I really want to get the maximal of the values in a series, 
I can be content to know that the MAXIMUM-OF function exists and 
be prepared to read the doc string what it actually does.

Aren't those more like AT-MAXIMUM and AT-MINIMUM ?

Yeah, that "intrinsic properties" is the softest part of the rule, 
and only really applies to core mezzanines. It is a little more accurate 
to say that for the container access functions that are in core, 
which are *all* legacy functions, the -of is implicit. If the alternative 
is putting a ? on the word, definitely use -of instead for new functions 
if they aren't for use in conditional contexts, or in some other 
way are a question.

The choice isn't between FACES? and FACES-OF, it's between FACES-OF 
and FACES.

And it wouldn't be INDEX-OF-MAXIMUM?: First of all, the ? is inappropriate, 
secondly, it returns the series, not the index. FIND-MAX isn't less 
descriptive because it references the behavior of MAX (which we have 
already learned means maximum) and FIND (which we know returns the 
argument series at the position of the thing found). We don't only 
get our conceptual context from English, we also get it from the 
rest of REBOL.

ChristianE, AT-MAXIMUM and AT-MINIMUM are much better, I'll relay 
that suggestion.

The choice isn't between FACES? and FACES-OF, it's between FACES-OF 
and FACES.

 - actually, not. The FACES? word is the one used now, which is created 
 in accordance with the current function naming wording, since we 
 defined a function collecting the faces contained in a panel.

R2 session:
>> a: make object! [b: []]
>> c: make a []
>> d: make a make object! []
>> same? a/b c/b
== false
>> same? a/b d/b
== false


So if this was changed in R3 I'm asking if it was intended or not. 
I don't care much what is the 'right' way but asking mainly because 
if the change was intended it should be well noted and documented 
otherwise it can make headache to people.

OH, I see your point now.

I think it's a bug now, It's doing the reverse of the R2 behavior.
>> d: make a make object! []
R3 reverse the parameters at some point and performs 
>> d: make object! [] a

In R3 
>> d: make obejct1 object2
should behave like
>> d: append object1 body-of object2

But yeah, the first form is more concise and faster.

yes copy control was implemented because of real world issues trying 
to use early R3 alphas and also because the lack of control in R2 
makes many big data sets very hard to manage in R2.

If it's a function that takes a face or gob as a parameter and returns 
the faces inside of it, I prefer FACES-OF. If it is a member function 
(assigned to a field of a face and bound to it), FACES. Those look 
best to those familiar with English. We're trying to cut down on 
*? for functions that aren't questions or part of the help system.

If necessary, yes. The noun-OF convention should be added, and some 
sensible *? conventions should be mentioned too. In particular, the 
"is it a question?" criteria is a good thing to mention.

I don't have the time this week to do so, and am waiting on some 
more community understanding before I jump in. The "intrinsic property" 
thing likely won't survuve the cut, being replaced by the "implicit 
-of" thing.

But, the 

    Face/faces


was used before the change, and it was not a function, but a block 
"storing" the faces

Then FACES-OF would be the best name for the function, letting 'faces 
be used for variables, and maybe letting FACES? mean "does it have 
faces?".

Where should be stored equivalent to R2's system/user/name and system/user/email 
?

Pekr, yes...from http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0079.html:

Conversions from vectors to blocks and binaries will also be supported.

blk: to block! vect
bin: to binary! vect

Details to be defined.

yes.. it's the extensions posibility... I was doing some heavy math 
with images recently and I think it's time to move and start using 
R3.. at least for new scripts.. which also require to rewrite some 
old which I use often.

Give me some time and I'll get to that

Elan Goldma registered to R3 Chat ... isn't it Elan, who wrote the 
first book on REBOL years and years ago? :-)