AltME groups: search

I had the same argument as you with a boss of a company, I did free-lance 
work for. I was able to convince them to buy REBOL/Command though, 
because the develop time went down by a factor 10 or so.


A bit along the same type or argument, I convinced a business partner 
of that company to implement XML-RPC instead of using SOAP based 
calling method across the internet. It saved us months of development 
time, and the other company could implement XML-RPC feature within 
days.


Just keep on arguing, also from a cost viewpoint. Don't give in! 
:) It pays.

Geomol - my boss bought me an SDK, because he know, that I would 
not program in anything else. It was not so expensive after all, 
not for a company running systems like SAP :-) I personally bought 
SDKs, Several command versions (prior to SDK), Pro version, and one 
IOS for 2K USD .... but nowadays I can state, that sponsoring stuff 
on voluntary basis is even better. So I actually put more money in 
Red than into REBOL SDK for e.g. :-)

I have following strategy to discuss - Carl always liked to work 
on HW too - Amiga, Viscorp set-top-box. Now he is with Roku, gaining 
important experience. Now let's say Roku goes under, some investor 
appears, Carl buys AmigaIP and we will get first Rebol/Amiga device 
out :-)

And then we build a spaceship and take a trip to the Moon. I always 
wanted that!

I have Amiga running on my cell phone.  It doesn't have quite the 
luster it used to.  In the 90's, I owned a large Amiga store and 
I did all my work on Amiga computers.  It was so much nicer than 
PCs.  However, there are now hundreds of Linux and BSD distributions, 
not to mention Windows, Mac and Android (yes, also a Linux distribution). 
 What I really miss is simplicity and the ability to easily customize 
a system to do only what you want and no more in a lightweight and 
efficient manner.

For this reason, I like Arch Linux.  Small, fast, easy to customize 
to do exactly what you want.  And it runs Rebol.

But I use Windows 8 at work, Windows XP and Windows 7 at home, and 
Linux for development and specialized tasks (like file serving).

I use Arch Linux on Raspberry Pi.  It works very well.  However, 
I have switched to Raspbian at present as some of the components 
I need are not yet available on Arch Linux and I don't have time 
to port and test them.  However, my project is almost ready for the 
first site test.

I wonder, if it's worth getting a Raspberry Pi at this point and 
try compile World to it.

The main difference between the Beagle Bone Black and the Raspberry 
Pi is the manufacturer of the system on a chip (SoC).  RasPi is Broadcom 
and Beagle Bone is Texas Instruments (TI).  The Beagle Bone Black 
has a faster processor (1GHz vs. 700MHz), but the RasPi can usually 
be reliably overclocked to 1GHz.  They both have a lot of I/O pins. 
 The RasPi is also a little cheaper.

When you buy such a bare board, you have to build a computer around 
it, which makes it much more expensive and uses a lot more power

Yes, but John compared it to an Amiga 1200, so you have to take into 
account the floppy drive it had and such. It was used as a personal 
computer, so you have to add a monitor, keyboard, mouse, perhaps 
a hard drive, etc.

RPI would be size and weight advantage. Hide it under a table. Hard 
to do with a 10 year old desktop for the same price.

The Pi can also be used as a cheap thin-client.  Just hook it up 
to the back of a monitor and have it run a remote desktop connection 
on boot. :-)

I've hidden several nine year old desktops under my desk. :-) If 
you get the small desktop models, they're not that big. And with 
those boards, you have loose boards, loose power supplies and lots 
of cables to hide

I actually wanted to use RPIs in that project I am still a part of, 
instead of those old desktops, but no REBOL or Red and won't be relevant 
when I'm leaving the project.

For such mobile systems, I think it would be better to use those 
new mini PCs inside a USB stick. They're very similar to a Raspberry, 
you get them in a case, and they can feed off a monitor

Then again, why not use laptops? Even easier to set up on location, 
and easier to program

Awesome work, Robert and team!

Congratulations Robert and Saphirion!

good news robert!  thanks for all the work and investment!

Reagarding Saphirion's documentation - maybe it's silly question, 
but could you try to change extension from .mdp to .md and see what's 
the difference on GitHub? I'm sure that it would look a little bit 
better directly in the browser as at least syntex for headers is 
almost similar in MarkDown as in MakeDocPro.

Even without header's modification and just changed extension produces 
more readable document:

https://github.com/Oldes/documentation/blob/master/arity.mdversus 
https://github.com/saphirion/documentation/blob/master/arity.mdp

Ladislav, is the method you outlined for defining variadic functions 
is there a way not to have the variadic function not change the arity 
of any functions following the variadic function?


i.e. with the definition of 'sumn, as you have it, if you have the 
following in a script:

print sumn 1 2
print "hello"


The "hello" doesn't print. I guess this is because when Rebol is 
'do-ing the script, the 'print is returned by the variadic function 
and the 'do dialect somehow doesn't re-interpret that word with its 
following argument, but sees it as a no-argument 'print. 

If, on the other hand, you have:

print sumn 1 2

do print "hello"	;or if you have something like "foo" instead of 
the 'do

hello
 will be printed out as intended


Could you describe what is happening here since I'm not exactly sure 
I understand how Rebol is handling things? Among other things, how 
is it OK to invoke arg-adder without providing the one arg it expects 
when you have "return/redo :arg-adder?

Yes, but it seems to make sense to base body text on this and build 
the rest around it. MDP has a particular way to format body text, 
but we've found that it's hard to extend. I would like an MDP2 that 
much better is capable of outputting right down from a single paragraph 
of markdown to a full multi-page document.

well, to me it makes sense not to reinvent the world and just use 
an existing markup like asciidoc which is intended for documents

I think that you can do that with asciidoc too .. using Chris' emitter 
and parser

It would be really enough to have MDP accept MD's style of headings. 
It's just silly from the outside view to use extension .mdp instead 
of already supported .md. I know that mdp is better and more capable 
than md, but I don't think it's easy to change Github to use mdp. 
I'm quite lucky that my Rebol colorizer (even buggy a little bit) 
found it's way there, which was not straight at all.

Unfortunately not enough to change extension. MDP is using === and 
--- for headers, where MarkDown is using ### http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

As much as I love makedoc, and as many docs as I have in that format, 
a more widely adopted standard that is close in syntax and features 
seems like the best option as a standard.

yes lets go on using VHS, not betamax or v2000. It is a bit similar. 
If mdp2 can be more flexible than MD and you can show it is as easy 
as MD and even do more with it, who needs to convince the world? 
The whole world is far from using MD now. There is a whole lot of 
undiscovered country left.

And if you can have mdp process MD doc's with very little adaptation 
(adding a kind of marker at the beginning) you can easily take over 
MD.

Arnold, yes, there are many competent document systems out there, 
but there hasn't been anyone that could be so easily plugged in and 
used as MakeDoc and MakeDocPro. I just want to move beyond their 
current limitations, so Saphirion can deliver professional, high-quality 
manuals to the customers.

I found MarkDown a good thought, like mdp, and ther obviously has 
been put some clever thinkwork into it, but six hashes for a h6 tag? 
And the alternative underline with "====" and or "----" does not 
convince me what happens if you do not match the length of the header? 
It compensates? so why not 3 or four like in mdp?

if others might maky their stuff and claim it beind de-facto standard, 
we can as well ... not sure if markdown is more popular than what 
github is using for their .md, but we should either adhere, or make 
converters and go our own way, or even better - introduce some clever 
layer, which will allow to recognise their format and render it properly, 
while allowing .mdp to be more powerful

my two cents.  

funny that all of these formats basically can be converted from one 
to the other in a few lines of parse.  


these text-based formats  may be super cool in non rebol scene, but 
I find this whole discussion about which equivalent to use... well 
... a bit anemic.


why not just use our own format internally and import from other 
formats at will... I mean really, its very easy to do.


I've been working with an extensible wiki format in QM and have been 
adding new things to it.  I don't see why we want to limit ourself 
to headers and titles and still wonder which one of the incapable 
formats to use.   are we using Rebol or are we trying to be as limited 
as all the others?  I mean, when I look at QM's wiki format I can 
add new specs in about 5 minutes, including supporting code which 
spits out html.  


 I think this kind of coding is something which must be leveraged 
 in any Open rebol project. let's allow people to import docs in whatever 
 format and manage them using something that makes sense for us?  
 including more expansive tags which are tailored for different sections 
 like a dictionnary, tutorials, traditional docs, guides, etc.

I've been rather dormant in many rebol spheres in the last months 
because I've been working a lot and most of it is commercial and 
private work, but I feel like its time for Rebolers to break out 
of their inferiority complex and show others that Rebol is better, 
more cutting edge than ever.  

And it still stays simple, overall, even in large projects.


I think the community has lost a bit of its resolve, and I am trying 
to make a point with the devcon.  Rebol has never gone away and its 
back on track.  


I think its up to everyone involved in public projects to promote 
this by actually playing on Its strengths.   I resisted the urge 
to build the site using public tools, and I think, Chris and I and 
building a super default framework just by catering to the needs 
of the devcon's web site.   Chris just added a news module to it 
(in one day).  we will show the site's internals at the devcon, showing 
how easy it really was to build up, using a centralized Git Repo 
to share the code and with the server, when ready for production.


Its ALL coded with REBOL.  at the devcon, we will look at packaging 
QM with cheyenne, Remark and making sure it all works with my web 
service API... with this l think the rebol community will have a 
pretty nice framework to rival RR and others.

Thanks for posting that link Ted!


I, too, want an all-REBOL toolchain and format. However, I view MD/MDP 
as a very basic format for plain communication and HTML generation. 
It is not a "structured" document format.  And while extensible is 
good, we can probably come up with a spec that outlines all that 
might need to be handled, to help guide a baseline design. e.g., 
while it's XML, DocBook was well thought out IIRC.


I admit that one of my problems with makedoc, historically, is consistent 
behavior and support for images and links. 

Don't forget Gab's QML either.

@Gregg, asciidoc uses a header *because* it's a document formatting 
tool.  There's a variety of styles supported .. and it's a pain to 
try and remember but I guess it gets easier with use.  The point 
for me is that it provides entry to docbook and then multiple other 
formats whereas makedoc/pro are stuck in a single page style html 
which is really past it for any serious documentation.

Pekr, I have several markdown docs now in the document repository, 
and they display quite nicely on github

For people in Windows Word World (I know I know ... double pane), 
MarkdownPad 2 was released on 05-Mar-2013 with standard and Pro version.

The pro version includes GFM support.  Pro costs $14.95 USD for a 
single user licence.
http://markdownpad.com/compare.html

This is the kind of stuff that I use because time isn't free and 
Git seems to be the place to converge to.
[If already posted (or hate windows), ignore immediately.]

Hmm.  I was asked to setup a brand new laptop with windows 8 today. 
 Cousin needs Office 360  so I click on the install which takes me 
to website.  I enroll him into windows live and start the installation. 
 Which then fails 5x .. brand new latop.  system restore and uninstall. 
 WTF!

@Arie, wrong group Announce. Bas already pointed this out. (Softwarefreedomday 
is his channel). I do not want to steal viewers from Bas' channel.

The point is I want to use this new channel as a dedicated channel 
for Red (and REBOL) specific video's. I imagine this being used by 
this community to post self-made tutorial video's on. The softwarefreedom 
channel is much broader than this. One does not exclude the other.

Why not use separate channels for Red, Red/System and Rebol respectively 
or conversely using a family name like "Rebol-like languages" or 
"Rebolish" or something similar ? Personally I prefer using separate 
names, even splitting furthermore amongst Rebol2 and Rebol3 ... but 
this is a suggestion only. In the end I also see some specific place 
for Boron, World, and Topaz but then everyone should point to the 
others or to a single "entry point portail" which points and summarizes 
the évolution and differences while it could alos only point to each 
of the specific related websites, as they appear  !!!

Robert, that sounds great. Congratulations to you and the team.

Robert: "The cool thing with this approach is one really don't need 
anything more than the Android encapper to produce the apk file. 
No need for android NDK, SDK or even JAVA to be installed ;-)"


Do I understand you reimplemented jarsigner, zipalign and the java 
XML binary compiler in Rebol?

Awesome. And then some.

Can't wait to free some time and start working with this.

Great work Kaj and Doc!

Congrats to all parties! Kaj for the hard-work, and Bo for the courage 
to go with Red/System solution. I would like to know the motivation 
to use Red/System instead of e.g. R3 (my understanding is, that R3 
has 0MQ available too?)

When I saw the opportunity, I had already thought that that might 
be something for Kaj, and now it even turns out he turned it in to 
a Red project too.

@Pekr: Part of the problem was that we needed to hook into the Windows 
kernel and also perform very fast operations because we're monitoring 
tens of thousands of files in real-time.  Plus, Kaj wanted to use 
the project to help Red mature, and I am completely in favor of helping 
in that manner.

(and Red has a Red/System part designed to operate on the same level 
as C, it is compiled)

R3 is not practical for me to use, because the target systems are 
Windows. I can test on Windows, but I develop on Linux. I could write 
an R3 script there, but my 0MQ extension for R3 is written in C, 
so I would have to set up and maintain a complete Windows development 
environment to compile it for Windows. Red and Red/System are much 
easier to deal with

Guys, this is great news! My first reaction was to get it posted 
on the MSDN site, but I'm not sure that reducing the need for Microsoft 
tools would be viewed as a positive thing from their point of view. 
It should be, though, since simplifying Windows driver development 
leads to more peripherals/accessories being integrated with the OS. 
It's a win for everyone (well, I guess not for the rabid anti-MS 
crowd). Between this and the similarly simple mobile dev that's coming, 
Red and R/S will be unbeatable.

The ELF emitter can optionaly include symbols in DWARF format, but 
there's no equivalent feature for the PE emitter (the PDB format 
is undocumented and quite complex). My plan has always been to provide 
a standalone native code debugger for Red/System, with a source-level 
debugger part once the IDE will be there. For the kernel-mode developments, 
we need some remote debugging functionality, which could be provided 
in different ways, including a specialized kernel driver in Red/System 
for debugging support. In the meantime, a kernel-mode PRINT will 
do. ;-)

Could anyone elaborat on those windows drivers? What is the main 
difference between the driver and the dynamic library your app might 
use? Is it that drivers have any higher precision/priority in regards 
to scheduled resources, they are running as services, and could be 
accessed from multiple app instances?

it uses TCP/UDP stack

 And how do you think your user app sends and receives TCP packets? 
 :-) It does through a kernel driver for the network card, provided 
 by the OS.

I agree though, that the Linux /proc approach is nicer and can be 
very helpful.

indeed.   adding an actually stable and simple virtual drive system 
to windows would be nice.  I've tried two free ones, and they just 
end up crashing the machine when used.

nah, it was a few years ago I don't remember any of it.   I had done 
a few searches and tried what I could.


IIRC the not for free solutions had a better reputation (but I didn't 
purchase any, it was just for fun).

MS has tried to improve things, and I think they have, with better 
test and validation tools for drivers. Helping people that way is 
key.

I saw the discussion about windows path names.  If you need to convert 
a path to not have spaces then windows uses a tilde ~ for truncating. 
 To see your path converted just open a command prompt and type dir/x

And using quotes doesn't work also?

Thanks Kaj.  Saw the Rebol boys this weekend and you, of course, 
were part of the key topics.

I thought it would be OK. When I got there at 11 PM Thursday and 
the hotel clerk said "I don't have a reservation for you" I wasn't 
so sure.   He found one for Michael Michael who had not shown up 
but had the same dates booked as I wanted.    He gave me that room 
because me and Michael Michael have the same home phone number... 
   But it went straight up when I met Gregg at breakfast and I enjoyed 
my whole time there.

Thank you Robert and Cyphre for the new Android release!

Robert, Thanks for the R3-gui release.  Do you have a date for Rebol 
and view engine also being part of a source release?  


These where one of the most frequently recurring discussions at the 
devcon.

Maxim, we are gaining experience with the git-svn bridget now. I 
think we will use it for a couple of weeks. Than the next move will 
be R3 and the View engine.

Thanks, Robert. Could you briefly describe somewhere (in just a few 
sentences) the workflow you use when working on/debugging r3-gui? 
i.e is it possible to stay in the same R3 instance and rebuild (do 
you even need to be using the monolithic r3-gui script when debugging?), 
reload the script safely, etc.

Robert, why not just dump the svn and create your own git server?

Include tips and tricks:


I run r3 with include and loader, the include.mdp documentation describes 
how it can be done.

Yes, the most efficient way(in Windows) is to setup INCLUDE+R3-GUI 
loader to be executed everytime you click on *.r3 script. I'm using 
that and every change to the R3GUI sources is then automatically 
"propagated" once I run any R3GUI script again.

Adrian, check the new wroding of README, and, eventually, submit 
a request, please.

Thanks for 3). As far as 1) and 2) go, it looks that you did not 
read

www.rebol.net/wiki/Money


yet?

or maybe adequate... The fact is that the syntax corresponds well 
to the money! name, and it makes sense to keep the syntax as is.

If counting just the votes for/against naming the IEEE 754 binary 
floating point datatype as float! and adding BrianH as one who prefers 
the decimal! name for backward compatibility reasons (he perceives 
a datatype name to be influencing language syntax in a big way) I 
am currently getting:


For float! name: Ladislav, Henrik, Andreas, Gregg, Robert, Doc, Rebolek, 
Endo
For decimal! name: BrianH

I would like to get more votes on this, though.

I don't think people are against a money! type per se.   we are just 
against the current datatype names assigned to implementations.

decimal! is not a decimal type
money! is not a currency type


we simply need to add a new real number type called FLOAT! and  properly 
assign the current types to what they really are.


shifting the implementation of money! to decimal!  (without its $ 
or currency designation) won't actually break any previous code a 
part from making it more precise and possibly a bit slower.


we can always keep the current money! as-is, but  I see no point 
in it.  since it doesn't actually do any type of currency management.

Money has meaning, and was one of the things that really excited 
me when I found REBOL. It was also one of my biggest disappointments, 
in R2, when I found that it didn't work right. So I'm thrilled with 
the new implementation. Unfrotunately, I don't have any great suggestions 
for a float! sigil, which would allow us to identify all of them 
lexically. And I can see changing the name of decimal! to float!, 
and money! to decimal! as potentially causing problems in code that 
displays results. Suddenly all the code that explicitly casts to 
decimal! will show dollar signs.

It's unfortunate that $ is U.S. centric, but is that a showstopper 
that requires a completely different approach, so we can support 
€. £, and more?

~ would be good for float! as it stends (for me) as an approximation 
and we know that IEEE 754 can't represent/store some decimal values.

But it is very boring to use in FR keybord as it is not displayed 
while you hit the key to allow ã or õ typing.

Ladislav, do you have any idea what the performance hit is for the 
new decimal implementation, versus float (current decimal! type)? 
A very quick test here was going to make me say ~30%, but division 
seems to get hit a lot harder. And I don't know how much of that 
is extra work R3 does for money, which wouldn't be there for a straight 
decimal type (if any).

OK, so there is no internal handling in place that would add overhead 
right now, correct? And ~30% could be a valid difference (not counting 
division).

And, let's not foget that the datatype is 96-bit, which certainly 
has to make the arithmetic slower as well.

when we talk about changing the datatype names, I think we accept 
that decimal wouldn't have any currency or denominator. 

its the implementation behind the type which would be switched, and 
a "new type" added which would map to the current decimal! handling.

There is a function abs and a function absolute which seem to be 
exactly the same. Is that on purpose?

Yes, ABS is just a shortcut name, like MAX and MIN.

Not that I know of. Some time back I set up a wiki on wikidot, but 
it doesn't have to be hosted there. The main idea is to have the 
data in a REBOL format so we can use it in various places. That's 
a big job, and we need to figure out how to represent comparisons. 
e.g., is R2 the baseline, and other systems could be compatible, 
extend, restrict, or just not have that functionality? 

http://rebol.wikidot.com/rebol-like-languages

Gregg, good starting point. I was looking for something like a simple 
diff version to identify the code parts needs to rewritten

and estimate the workload when migrating R2 to R3. Ladislav, will 
talk to Robert. Thanks for info.

Basically this files are like .INI file and I have to change values 
inside with Rebol.

I have found that R3 is able to load my UTF16LE file correctly using 
'read/string (it "see" the BOM and transcode it to rebol string!).


Now I have to find a way to write to the file as a UTF-16 with a 
litle endian BOM format.

Just to clarify: Carl said it was his intention to stop by if he 
can get away from work for a bit.  I'm going to see if I can pin 
him down to a date and time.

Yes, thanks. I saw them. I or some of our team will check them and 
integrate them.

Graham, I knew about this accident.

The solution we have is to revert the changes and inform the user 
as soon as we acknowledge the problen.

For us docs stay on github. From there we integrate back into our 
mainline and make official releases. And from our mainline the docs 
on our web-site are generated.

Everyone is free to use the github as base for a wiki.

Andreas, I have read the REBOL3 group and wrote the request. Then 
read the ANNOUCE one and discovered the answer to my request was 
already there !

and what version of mysql?

Continuing from #Red group. A johnk asked for multi-line source from 
Carl. This is my W_GETS code in World, which has multi-line (blocks 
and long strings). I don't know, if you can use it, as World might 
be different internal:

char prompt_str[]	= "prin system/console/prompt";
char block_str[]	= "prin system/console/block";
char string_str[]	= "prin system/console/string";

#define W_GETS \
	if (W->line_read) { \
		free (W->line_read); \
		W->line_read = NULL; \
	} \
	if (W->top_of_series > W->series_base) { \
		W->stack = W->stack + 1; \
		int trace = W->trace; \
		W->trace = 0; \
		if (*W->top_of_series == BLOCK_BEGIN_T) { \
			tv.newline = 1; \
			do_string (W, block_str); \
			int i; \
			for (i = 0; i < W->top_of_blocks - W->blocks; i++) \
				w_printf ("    "); \
		} else { \
			do_string (W, string_str); \
			w_printf ("    "); \
		} \
		W->trace = trace; \
		W->stack = W->stack - 1; \
	} else { \
		W->top_of_code = W->code - 1; \
		W->top = -1; \
		if (NULL != W->P) \
			printf ("**** W->P != NULL ****\n"); \
		W->stack = W->stack + 1; \
		int trace = W->trace; \
		W->trace = 0; \
		do_string (W, prompt_str); \
		W->trace = trace; \
		W->stack = W->stack - 1; \
	} \
	W->line_read = w_readline (&auto_brackets, &tab_completion); \
	reset_stack (W); \
	if (W->line_read == NULL) throw_error (W, ERRMEM_S); \
	if (W->line_read[0] == KEY_CTRL_D) throw_error (W, QUIT_S); \
	W->save_line_read = W->line_read;

Some exmplanation:


W->top_of_series is a stack holding the different types of series 
being entered in the lexer, defined as:

#define BLOCK_BEGIN_T		58
#define PAREN_BEGIN_T		59
#define LONG_STRING_BEGIN_T	60
#define PATH_BEGIN_T		61
#define GET_PATH_BEGIN_T	62
#define LIT_PATH_BEGIN_T	63
#define BINARY_BEGIN_T		64
#define SET_GET_PATH_T		65


The code about trace is just, if tracing is on or off in World. W->top_of_code 
is a pointer to where the code for the virtual machine in World is 
being created, and W->code is the bottom of that stack in instructions, 
W->top the top. do_string executes a string of World code.

Hi,

  REBOL language differs from other languages because you can write 
  "human resembling" code lines.

  During the past weeks I have thought about a way to make more understandable 
  the language in a simple way

   now you can write:

   mypage: read http://www.rebol.com

    I whish to write:

    set the variable mypage: reading from http://www.rebol.com


    It is actually impossible to have this stile but if you add another 
    way of commenting it woul be possible. Lets assume we have a way 
    to start comments with "/*" and and comments with "*/"

    Now we can write


    /*set the variable*/ mypage: /*reading from*/ http://www.rebol.com

    Another line:

    for myvar 1 10 2 [print myvar]


    for /*(set)*/ myvar /*starting from*/ 1 /*reach*/ 10 /*use the stepping*/ 
    2 /* and execute*/ [print myvar]


    Code editors could remove the pairs /* */ and display commenting 
    words in a different color and each line could be read this way:

    set the variable mypage: reading from http://www.rebol.com


    for (set) myvar starting from 1 reach 10 use the stepping 2 and execute 
    [print myvar]


    For people which are learning the language and even for seniors, 
    having this commenting could help a lot.