AltME groups: search

hmm, doesn't understand clipboard.  Is it a windows only thing?

(Update fails as well, I know there is a newer v2)

might be that its not working on OSX, there are quite a few OSX REBOLers 
here, one will surely pop up and confirm/infirm

Welcome Jonathan!


The console is your friend, but you're not the first to overwrite 
a system word and have to start a new session. REBOL has a few gotchas. 
With great power and all that. 

>> d: now/weekday
== 3
>> pick system/locale/days d
== "Wednesday"
>> system/locale/days/:d
== "Wednesday"

>> day-name: func [date [date!]] [pick system/locale/days date/weekday]
>> day-name now
== "Wednesday"

That depends if you have access to libraries that already do this. 
REBOL can't do this directly, but it may be possible through a DLL.

REBOL does not currently run _on_ any phones (that I know of) though 
this blog post offers some hope:
    http://www.rebol.com/cgi-bin/blog.r?view=0274


If you want to connect _to_ a phone from a REBOL-supported platform 
(Win, Lin, MAC, etc) then, as Henrik says, the crucial issue is the 
API to access the phone's functions. REBOL can probable connect to 
that API. But without more details, we'd be guessing.

I'd suggest that if you want to try REBOL, you need to figure out 
the basics first to figure out why we use it. REBOL is not a very 
popular language, but the followers are pretty loyal.

oh thank you a lot, i think there i finde some answers

Just thought I'd wave hello in here.  I've been following the rebol 
project a while and decided to take the plunge.  I have both rebol2 
and 3 downloaded, I assume viewtop is only enable for rebol2 at the 
moment and rebol3 is cli only?

welcome! and yes, correct, r3 doesn't have a desktop and won't get 
one. it will be replaced with ReBrowse, a browser-like launcher environment.

no ETA on rebrowse. it will be quite a while before R3 is done. if 
you want a "complete" experience, you can focus on R2. R3 is the 
cutting edge, where development happens, but it's incomplete.

I guess what I'm trying to avoid is spending a lot of time learning 
something in r2 which is obsolete/redundant or majorly different 
in r3.  I suppose I could try running the various r2 demos and one 
liners under r3 and learn for myself the syntax differences.

Yes that makes sense.  It was the words i read that "r3 was a complete 
rewrite of r2" that made me question whether it was worth learning 
all parts of r2

great, r2 it is then.  I've been passively watching the rebol project 
for a while now, years in fact.  I'm now keen to 'at last' throw 
time at it , learn it all and start programming in it

ok, simple r2 problem i'm having.  the cli window  is closing as 
soon as the script ends when i run the simple demos via the viewtop. 
 Any way to force the cli window to remain open - besides adding 
a "press any key" context to end of each script..  I'm using xp at 
the moment I swear the window use to remain open - but maybe I am 
confused with my linux rebol experiences..

there may be a quit command in the script, so the script will close 
the console no matter what.

no there is no quit command.   actually i've run a few scripts which 
have halt at the end, and that keeps the output window open

Thinking about this, it's only natural for any output console window 
to close after script execution.  For running the demos via viewtop 
though, it would be nice to either have the script wait at the end, 
ask for user entry, or maybe have a permanent viewtop console window.

ok, that script needs a HALT at the end.

When you launch them from the viewtop, a separate process is created.

Well I'm just a typical new user trying out the demos from viewtop. 
 I know there's a few ways to execute code

David, you might also want to look at the r2-forward script by BrianH 
- it's intended to retrofit a good amount of the newer R3 functionality 
into R2. You can dowload that using R3 chat.

Most of R2/Forward was added to R2 itself with the 2.7.7 release. 
The rest was added to 2.7.8 (release pending). There are some limits 
as to what R3 functionality can be retrofitted into R2, but you'd 
be surprised. Also, look at the source - it's also meant to serve 
as documentation about differences between R3 and R2, although it 
can be a bit on the advanced side here and there.

Brian, what's the intent wrt delect? With Carl's most recent wiki 
page describing commands, it seems that a fair amount of  delect's 
parsing power (optional, out of order args) won't be available using 
these - is delect going to remain?

It's unknown at this point whether DELECT will remain: The command-processing 
functionality of DELECT has been moved into DO-COMMAND. I'm guessing 
that DELECT will end up being a preprocessor that generates DO-COMMAND 
blocks; the wiki you mentioned says that a similar preprocessor is 
run on Draw blocks before they are sent to DO-COMMAND (the "For special 
draw dialects..." paragraph).

How can I convert money to a number or a char ?

>> to integer! $1
** Script Error: Invalid argument: $1.00
** Near: to integer! $1.00

>> to char! $65
** Script Error: Invalid argument: $65.00
** Where: halt-view
** Near: to char! $65.00

decimal/money not being convertible to one another is a strange ommission 
in R2

We did a really thorough revamp of conversion in R3. And doing the 
same in R2 would be comparable in scope.

Great way to exploit a terrible bug for the benefit of all! :)

This is math ... not a bug

The type conversion is a bug. The math is the benefit.

if you divided by a decimal, then it should return a money type. 
  which it does.

No string conversion, no floating point division(?); we have a winner!

thanks for the quick answers! you guys are great


I'm building a function that computes the challenging code for  web 
socket  protocol, 

It uses unsigned 32 bit integer, so I use money instead of integer, 
to avoid overflow.

Does it have to be a string, or will binary do?

thanks ladislav, but I prefer a small routine ad hoc instead of a 
generic and more complex one.
I have to be small with this code

umh... but this fails if I pass a number > 2^31

The bug was my fault, I was using a wrong variable name.
Thanks all for the help.

The complete (working) function to calculate the challenging code 
server side in web socket protocol is:

ws-chall: funct [header [string!]] [		
	
	cnt: funct [k] [
		n: copy "" 
		ns: 0 
		repeat x k [
			if all [x >= #"0" x <= #"9"][
				append n x
			] 
			if x = #" " [
				ns: ns + 1
			]
		]
		if ns = 0 [
			return none
		]			
		(to decimal! n) / ns
	]
	
	int-2-char: funct [n [integer! decimal!]] [
		;n: to decimal! n
		head insert insert insert insert make string! 4
			to char! n / 16777216
			to char! (n // 16777216) / 65536 
			to char! (n // 65536) / 256
			to char! n // 256
	]

	attempt [
		t: parse/all replace/all header crlf lf "^/"

  l: copy [] repeat x t [if n: find x ":" [insert tail l reduce [copy/part 
  x (index? n) - 1 next n]]] l: head l
		k1: next select l "Sec-WebSocket-Key1"
		k2: next select l "Sec-WebSocket-Key2"
		k3: next next find header "^/^/"
		aux1: cnt k1
		aux2: cnt k2
	]

	if any [none? aux1 none? aux2 none? k3] [return ""]

 to-string checksum/method rejoin [int-2-char aux1 int-2-char aux2 
 k3] 'md5		
]

why  join "a" find "x" "abc" gives "anone" ? Is it useful ?

[Henrik was faster] so the second argument gets changed to the type 
of the first. Or, failing that, both are changed to string!
Try these to see:
   join "a" [1 2 3]
   join 26-jun-2010 "999"

this seems correct, but none isn't a special type?  I would like 
to use it as "neutral value" in operations

IMHO join "a" none should give "a" , length? none should give 0 and 
next none should give none

@Davide: I've actually thought the same thing about none, with respect 
to joining (though I think [0 = length? none] would be unwise, just 
as [true = true? 0] would be a mistake).

Yet in Rebol sometimes the "tail wags the dog"... there are often 
deeply entrenched reasons where some implementation detail of how 
X functionality is built on top of Y functionality means you get 
a certain behavior... like, if none didn't print as "none" it would 
break the reflection model or something with MOLD.  The go-to person 
on telling you the underlying facts of the matter is generally BrianH. 
 :)

Rebol programming can be very much like a trapeze without a safety 
net.  I have bent some of the rules in a dialect I made where (for 
instance) you can use constants or words as the clauses in if or 
either conditions.  So you can write things like [str: either condition 
"truestring" "falsestring"], instead of [str: either condition ["truestring"] 
["falsestring"]]

fork you probably are right, but I still think that  length? none 
should not stop the script with an error.
Could'n it produce a "warnig" only or a catchable error instead?

what I do is normally wrap such code in an ALL block. NONE can mean 
so many things and it's best to trap a NONE where you know it appears 
during an operation that requires a series as input.

But 90% of the time, when you find a Rebol decision when you are 
not used to the language and study it after a time you will find 
it was made after a lot of deliberation.

For better or worse, this thing has been cooked and tweaked for far 
more than a decade... so there's a lot of experience guiding the 
choices, especially if you're using R3.  (R2 had rather more clunky 
edges to it when viewed in hindsight.)

most of the time you're probably masking bugs
 - exactly.

Now if all these accepted NONE and returned 0 at the end:

length? find find find my-string "a" "b" "c"
== 0

where would the error be?

I think we had a similar discussion about index? .. it errors when 
find returns none

Yep, this discussion is recurring. There are pros and cons.
I would like to know the opinion of Carl about this.

#[none] could be a special "transient" value which impacts the behavior 
of DO .

Allowing to passthru a chain of functions without breaking the flow.

The INDEX? case has been covered by a CureCode discussion, and it 
looks like a good idea. For LENGTH?, the same behavior of returning 
none when passed none would make just as much sense. Under no circumstances 
should INDEX? or LENGTH? return an integer when passed none, not 
even 0.

Davide, REBOL doesn't have a neutral value for any type. This is 
by design. What we have instead is a value that can be used to mean 
nothing: none. And we have control structures to convert non-values 
to a default value: ANY and DEFAULT. R3's control structures are 
built around that principle, including the changes to the ordinal 
functions and EXTRACT.

Again, this is the awkward dynamic between consistency and intuition. 
 If you can state an invariant, like "If S is a string, then append 
S FOO is equivalent to append S to-string FOO" (for example) then 
it might be like "oh, it makes sense once you know that rule".  But 
you've got to find the layer at which people program, and this is 
when I start using the phrase "tail wagging the dog" because people 
are being asked to program at the APPEND layer so the implementation 
details of append should be secondary to what is sensible.

join "a" any [ find "x" "abc" copy "" ]

I know what you mean, as appending none to a block does add a "none". 
 Though APPEND [A B] NONE currently seems to do the same thing as 
APPEND [A B] 'NONE.  I would be interested to know the side effects 
of saying APPEND [A B] NONE gave [A B] while APPEND [A B] 'NONE gave 
[A B NONE].

What you said to do is append none to a string. By your reaction, 
you wanted to append an empty string to the string. That means this 
(assuming that you don't know that the none is there):
>> append "mystring" any [none ""]
== "mystring"

The need for none to be explicitly converted to other values, rather 
than implicitly, is an intentional design choice that has been applied 
to a great deal of R3. It is not an error.

As for the side effects of not appending none, Fork, that woulld 
ruin blocks that contain fixed-length records of positionally accessed 
data, a common useage pattern. If nothing is appended, the positions 
of the subsequent stuff would be off.

>> join "a" any [ find "x" "abc" copy "" ]
pretty common idiom (though, you don't need of the copy)

Why would we need to convert #[none] to 'none ? The value #[none] 
is more useful; because of ANY and DEFAULT. Neither of those will 
convert 'none to a default value, but they will convert #[none].

>> join "a" any [ find "x" "abc" copy "" ] 

I will use this idiom, thanks. 

But still I think that having "idioms" in programming language  is 
a  symptom of something not really correct.

All programming languages are inherently limited. You have a limited 
number of built-in words and concepts. Because of this there will 
only be a limited number of concepts that can directly be supported 
by the language without combining words. To form other concepts, 
you need to combine words - aka composing functions. As more concepts 
are shared, the best combination of words to express them will be 
shared and refined as well. These combinations of words are idioms. 
Idioms are not a symptom of something which is not correct, quite 
the opposite. The ability to form idioms is a sign of a healthy language 
that is more powerful, able to handle more complex concepts. Idioms 
are always an inherently good thing.

The trick for language design is not to get rid of idioms, but instead 
to do whatever you can to make possible to make simple idioms more 
powerful. This is usually done by making the different parts of the 
language fit together better, and and more flexibly. You get more 
flexibility by making the core concepts simpler, and then making 
them as widely and consistently applicable as you can without breaking 
them. Consistency is key here, and not just key in a positive way. 
More consistency means that you can fit more of the parts of the 
language together better. However, you have to limit consistency 
to places where it makes sense, and has real benefits. False consistency 
can get in your way.

>> append #{} 15
== #{3135}
>> append #{} "15"
== #{3135}


Why if I append an integer to a binary it is first converted to an 
ascii string?

IMHO it should be like this:
>> append #{} to-char 15
== #{0F}

We don't yet have a CureCode project for R2.

Nice! But you have to do it in sections of 10 or less, due to the 
length of tuples; not a complaint, a gotcha to look out for.

Hello - hope someone can find the newbie mistake I'm making here. 
 Wanted to use REBOL to tackle a need to get data from Salesforce 
using their SOAP API.  New to SOAP, WSDL and Salesforce, but using 
SoapUI mananged to do this POST (edited only to hide personal info):

POST https://login.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/19.0HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
SOAPAction: ""
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: login.salesforce.com
Content-Length: 525


<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:urn="urn:partner.soap.sforce.com">
   <soapenv:Header>
      <urn:CallOptions>
         <urn:client></urn:client>
         <urn:defaultNamespace></urn:defaultNamespace>
      </urn:CallOptions>
   </soapenv:Header>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <urn:login>
         <urn:username>[jort-:-xxxxxxxxxxxxx-:-com]</urn:username>

         <urn:password>xxxxxxxxxx78l6g7iFac5uaviDnJLFxxxxx</urn:password>
      </urn:login>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

and get the desired response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: 
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 736
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:32:14 GMT


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns="urn:partner.soap.sforce.com" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"><soapenv:Body><loginResponse> 
......

Then using SoapUI I am able to send a successful Logout message.


Using REBOL 2.7.7.3.1, I created an "upload" string containing the 
POST block above without the "POST " at the beginning, set my url 
to:

>> url
== https://login.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/19.0

and tried this:

>> response: read/custom url reduce ['POST upload]

but consistently get a Server 500 error:


** User Error: Error.  Target url: https://login.salesforce.com:443/services/Soap/u/19.0 
could not be retrieved.  Se
rver response: HTTP...
** Near: response: read/custom url reduce ['POST upload]

For completeness, here's the upload value:

>> print mold upload
{https://login.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/19.0HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
SOAPAction: ""
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: login.salesforce.com
Content-Length: 525


<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:urn="urn:partner.soap.sforce.com">

   <soapenv:Header>
      <urn:CallOptions>
         <urn:client></urn:client>
         <urn:defaultNamespace></urn:defaultNamespace>
      </urn:CallOptions>
   </soapenv:Header>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <urn:login>
         <urn:username>[jort-:-researchpoint-:-com]</urn:username>

         <urn:password>metrics12378l6g7iFac5uaviDnJLFVprDl</urn:password>
      </urn:login>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>}

Would appreciate any help you can give!

Why is there a one byte difference in the cotent-lengths?

Hi Graham - sorry to be dense - how did you determine there was a 
1 byte difference in length?


Re. the soap body format, I just copied/pasted from the SoapUI screen....I 
will have to test and see if the newlines are the problem - Thanks 
for the suggestion!

I also see a 1 byte difference in length - all I did was open Rebol 
and use length? - and it returned 526.

Thought I'd see this question asked before, but couldn't find it. 
 Using makdedoc2 to create a simple table, I cannot figure out how 
to present an empty cell.  Following the table example from http://www.rebol.net/docs/makedoc/fastmd.html:

===Table

\table

Column 1

Column 2

Column 3

=row

Row 1, col 1

Row 1, col 2

Row 1, col 3

=row

Row 2, col 1

Row 2, col 2

Row 2, col 3

/table


But an extra blank row will not give you a blank cell - consequently, 
my cell values are shifting to the left to fill in the empty cells.


Is there a solution to this?  Many thanks in advance for your help!

Hi Henrik!


the "" hold the place, so that my cells no longer shift over, but 
that value gets displayed in my output as a pair of double quotes, 
when I'd prefer to see a blank.  This output is headed to an Excel 
spreadsheet, for what that's worth.

IIRC, I used a dash for empty cells. For export purposes, if you 
really need it blank, you may need to use a special value and then 
post-process it out. I don't know how to do a blank value right off 
either. All the normal tricks of NONE or () won't work in this context.

everything I try seems to get taken as a literal value, so a dash 
will be a dash.

Extra blank lines do not work, if that's what you mean by folded.

Yes, I used a dash as a dash, knowing that meant the cell was empty. 
I think post-processing is the way to go.

especially since all it needs is a replace/all  :-)

Between a WRITE and a READ. :-)

I haven't used make-doc for a long while, but maybe you can insert 
HTML's  

Then there's ascii char 160, which you can generate in rebol with 
to-char 160. I think they call it a 'hard space' or something.

Don't worry, it was a fake account.

What is the issue! datatype? A release? A specification? A problem?

The issue! type is a string type that is used for special purposes. 
One of those pruposes is a preprocessor script called prebol, which 
is used by the SDK. If you saw #do in a script it is likely a prebol 
directive.

Hi. So is this the correct group to ask a codingn question?

I''m trying to understand this language, sometimes getting it, sometimes 
not. Anyway here's my question.

In VID, I have a layout.  I want to put random images in 3 columns 
with 5 rows.  The images are stored together in a single binary file. 
(this is a mod of the card game on Nick's tutorial site).


So I read in the images into a series,  after I set the layout. But 
how do add those to the layout?

Here's my current code:
do %cards.r

the-tableau: layout [
	size 320x480 backdrop 0.170.0
	across
	at 30x20 tc1: box 80x100 teal 
	tc2: box 80x100 teal 
	tc3: box 80x100 teal return
	at 30x130 tc4: box 80x100 teal
	tc100: box 80x100 coal
	tc5: box 80x100 teal return
	at 30x240 tc6: box 80x100 teal
	tc200: box 80x100 coal
	tc7: box 80x100 teal return
	at 30x350 tc8: box 80x100 teal
	tc9: box 80x100 teal
	tc10: box 80x100 teal
]

foreach [card label num color pos] cards [
	
	dimg: load to-binary decompress (card)
	append deck-cards dimg ;feel movestyle
	throw-away-label: label
	append deck-cards-num num
	append deck-cards-color color
	throw-away-pos: pos
]

view/new the-tableau

do-events

i want to replace each of the boxes in the layout with a random image 
from deck-cards.

That does help, thanks!  But still having some trouble seeing what's 
going on.

I see what random-card does, I think.  length? card-images returns 
how many are in the series of card-images.  Then random returns a 
number based on length?.  And pick chooses one of the card-images 
based on the random number.


But what is happening in the foreach?  It iterates over the images 
in the layout, correct?  The c is just an arbitrary variable, it 
could be anything, right?

in REBOL all functions return a value, even if you do not use the 
return word (its actually better not to use return explicitely, since 
its faster)


so the random-card function returns an image!  from the card-images 
block.


the set-face function applies the image to its default meaning for 
that style.

The plan was to read  card at random into a block called the-deck, 
then remove them one at a time, and add them to another block called 
the-tableau.

I've got important work to do right now, but if you can wait, I can 
give you a working solution later.

No, tableau is a term I seem to recall from an old According to Hoyle 
card rules book, meaning the layout of the cards to be played.

Note I added a bit of meat to the do-events topic raised by Graham, 
as an extra answer.

and yes... it would be swell if you rate the answer as the final 
one  (shameless I know, but worth the time and effort Me thinks  
;-)

Is there a way to make objects a and b such that operations like 
a + b make sense? Like a complex number object.

Geomol has done a complex number library.....Discussion is here:

   http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-posts.r?offset=0&post=r3wp381x1804

Geomol's complex number library represents a workable approach to 
implementing a large integer math library. But has anyone already 
implemented one? That is, bc's ability to do +, -, *, and / on very 
large numbers? I've been trying to call bc from REBOL using the CALL 
stmt, but success has so far eluded me.

There is this:
   http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=bignumbers.r

But (from a quick squint) it handles numbers as strings. That may 
be less effective than the usual bignum approach [which, in REBOL 
terms, might be a block of 32-bit binaries]

Isn't there a libbc?

The block of binaries would give better performance, but the string 
approach might be fast enough. I'll take a look at it. Thx.

Strings are probably fine for 12 or 13 digit numbers.

REBOL3 has 64-bit integers, so that is well within range of a native 
REBOL 3 INT.
Is R3 a possibility for your project?

Yes, it is. Native would be great. I just tried some simple stuff 
on R3 so I'll experiment further. Thanks a lot.