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Just to split your thinking Gabriele, is the Beta going to have a 
REBOL/Core .so for us Linux people?  With enough docs to have a go 
at embedding in something like say a D program?

also about docs... i plan to be available here full time for a couple 
days after release, to answer all questions and provide some kind 
of support.

I am on Vista right now ... it is a fine ... useless, mess :-)

Vista is pretty much what I expected MS to come up with, and that's 
a terrifying thought.

You've come to a sad realization...Cancel or Allow

but, i bet you guys will have a thousand questions anyway.

yes, I just meant posting the link to docs could speed-up after-release 
phase, as ppl would at least theoretically know what is coming and 
what is particular design meaning of new things. IMO post-docs-one-week-before-the-release 
could be a good thing to consider ....

I'm a little concerned about the direction to take Desktop Library 
II.  I want to make Sunanda and the team happy, but I don't really 
want a product with a pre-expired shelf life.  It's getting close 
to 3/4s complete, but have a feeling it may be an R2 only code base. 
 :(

Henrik - what does it mean, later? I am for later release, if you 
say its vital ... just state it a bit bettern than 1.8. I would be 
fine with 1.9., or 1.10. if you ask me ....

In which case, R2 will get a stable release of ESMTP and LNS (he 
said with his fingers crossed)?

Henrik - you know me and you know what I fear - pekr coming to final 
r3 VID, playing with it for few minutes, asking - how would I do 
that? And getting the answer, that it was not inteded to do such 
a thing and that it would require VID rewriting :-))

Yeah, but a production release of R3 is what, 18 months away?

imo release could be regarded production level, if features added 
are stable. And that is imo also the plan. e.g. iirc unicode will 
not be there for 3.0 ... it will come later. But that does not mean 
3.0 could not be used for many usefull things already, and being 
called a production release, no?

I don't think it's that far away. I think there will be a ton of 
additional work on extending R3, that could easily take 1-2 years 
after the first release of R3.

That's what I was thinking.  R3 won't really be mainstream for quite 
a while no?

But what about the "user" community during that phase.  They won't 
wait around will they?  Not to say I don't plan on trying my best 
to help out with R3, but I don't see taking it to a construction 
site boss for quite few more days/weeks/months.

we need new C coders ... it will be a tough task, to attract new 
ppl being able to contribute good C code to extend REBOL ...

So I'm still back to planning for say an Invoicing application for 
a site boss.  That will be R2 code base for quite some time, no?

Ok, so there has to be a plan to keep mainstream app building with 
forward momentum while building up R3.  imho.  So doesn't that mean 
wrapping at least a production release of 2.7.6?

pekr, yep, incomplete style set. a few issues to be worked out with 
the layout model, bugs here and there and optimization.

brian, I think 2.7.6 is a good idea. It currently requires that someone 
clones Carl, so he can finish 2.7.6. :-)

Part of my involvement over the last few months has been rebol.org, 
and I plan on being one of the grunts getting it R3 ready, but consulting 
work will still need to be a viable option for rebols until R3 can 
be taken to say an Insurance Company or small business, no?  Or is 
R3 going to hit the ground running so fast that it can be taken to 
an Executive sooner than later?

driver developers will be essential.
Why? I thought, REBOL had a minimum interaction with host OS.

No I think that RT will try and have a minimal interaction with host 
OS...that's what I took from the DevCon talks.

I can live without 2D hardware acceleration, I guess. But if there 
is a standard way of having it across platforms, it could be a good 
idea.

Geomol, that's the beauty of R3: We don't have to skip DirectX, since 
a developer can make that interface if he/she wants to.

I'm all for porting, but not if wating for key features means delaying 
work for "normal" folk.  I'm at a point where some of the bosses 
are actually getting pretty good at R2 data types.  :)

Pekr;  Re r1 to r2.  I was a dropout from the computer biz from 1999 
till about January this year, so I was watching from a purely curiosity 
perspective, no vested interest.  Now the interest is much higher 
and far more vested.  :)  In that regard I'm still new.

Henrik, it's good, that R3 is open in a way, that it's possible to 
interface all kinds of systems. But I wouldn't recommend interface 
too deep into anything, that is tied to a certain platform, like 
DirectX is. We should find good cross-platform standards and interface 
with those from REBOL, so all REBOL software can run on anything.

Geomol, I think you mean that _RT_ should not focus on DirectX. :-) 
I don't see anything wrong with a 3rd party developer doing work 
on interfacing DirectX.

Look a our situation with truetype fonts in DRAW. It's one single 
little issue in one corver of REBOL, yet we don't have it on all 
platforms, even if there is truetype fonts on all platforms. Imagine 
the situation, if we had many such things with all different areas 
of REBOL. So not only RT should choose carefully, also us developers 
who would like our software to run everywhere.

I think, you just have to include the glut dll with your app install. 
It's only a file to be copied.

GLUT have many things, we lack currently in REBOL, like key-up events. 
Also some window-handling, mouse-handling, etc. I just suggest GLUT 
as a shortcut to have these things. In the final version, when all 
that C code is found for all platforms, GLUT can be droppen again.

A list of all the functions is found here: http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net/documentation/manual/index.xml
Scroll down to see the GLUT functions.

GLUT also add joystick support to some degree across platforms, so 
for e.g. game writers, GLUT is a good library to use.

AFAIK GLUT is simple wrapper which has been used mainly just to show 
some basic OpenGL demos. I'm not sure if this is a good  for usage 
in some 'real' crossplatform apps.

Regarding the OpenGL version of Rebol: this version is not yet worked 
on but I plan to work on it once the AGG based version is complete 
(as it this will give us much better big picture where the OpenGL 
advantages could be really useful in the visual system).

AFAIK the plug-in interface is not yet finalized so it is too early 
to discuss ho this will be exactly exposed.


But there are more things to consider than the blitting. If you do 
SW redered graphics you need to render into the  backbuffer in the 
main memory then you transfer block(s) sing a blit to the gfx card. 
If you do HW accelerated graphics you need to transfer all bitmaps 
into the gfx card memory first..also you are limited by the OpenGL 
2D functionality (which is not so flexible and pixel perfect as for 
example AGG implemntation). Also setting pixels directly in gfx card 
memory is possible but this is surprisingly the slowest way to dorendering! 
Why? Because fur current PC HW bus architecture is such transfer 
very expensive operation comparing to moving one big block of data.

So as you can see all this (and lot of other issues) needs to be 
considered not to mention that the solution should be as much as 
compatible on most of platforms.

Once the beta is released it will give us good picture how to make 
the gfx system even more optimized and extensible.

Pekr, yes I'm rebolling quite a lot these days! :-) The BASIC dialect 
is done in my spare time. At work I'm doing a COBOL formatter in 
REBOL as we speak.

I think a lot of banks use COBOL

hehe, just reading Alianz success story. Those bank guys don't fear 
risking choosing non-traditional aproach. They chose AcuCobol with 
its own file system as a storage instead of relational database. 
Those IT ppl must be crazy, to run such a big house ... well, without 
SAP and Oracle :-)

Naa, not so crazy. The Vision file system used in AcuCobol is really 
really simple. Not much can go wrong, as with a huge database. And 
it's very fast.

now as REBOL will be there in form of both DLL and .so, we could 
try to "merge" rebol with some technology, to see how it works out. 
Then you could create specific dialects, which could help programmers/users 
life easier. Such a dialect would generate target code ...

Pekr, good ideas! I'm a free-lancer, so find someone to fund the 
development and then contract me.

Or maybe i nice security blanket with a REBOL logo? ;-)

security blanket with a REBOL logo? Don't understand :-)

lol Find a dictionary! :-)

I have a rebol small flag somewhere, and T-shirt too ....

When I was doing Smalltalk+rules at  a .net Insurance firm in Cleveland 
 I had a lot of COBOL/DB2 folks my own age to kibbutz with ... in 
the midst of young people doing Javascript and C#.  So why not Rebol 
?

I am not speaking for Rebol or Carl, but I do know that he and the 
team have been wonderfully busy, have been getting a LOT done, and 
they are very close to being complete.  Any snide comments will be 
rewarded with complete silence from me…

Other proof is, that I was contacted by two persons in the past, 
who accused REBOL community of elitarism. The thing was, that once 
they asked something, I always had some background info. They did 
not, they felt excluded from being informed. So - current blogs helped 
a lot, but my opinion is, that we should never forget those, who 
are not part of "darknet" (popular term last weeks here :-)

...................But Pekr, Im not "the company", I'm just a guy, 
telling you what I know...

I asked for it here, not directly to Carl via email, as I don't want 
to disturb him. Guys who communicate with him on a daily basis has 
stronger influence right now and hence Carl could tell himself - 
hell ya, it is already one month? Well, blog, why not?

I think Pekr is just as curious as the rest of us and enjoys news...any 
news of Rebol3's present stage of deveoplment. I do not think he 
is off base asking for a monthly blog. Reichart, I read these many 
of these posts everyday and I rarely ever see "snide" remarks so 
I'm confused why your brasing yourself. Although, reiderating what 
we already know about the teams hardwork and that it should be "soon" 
does not add to the conversation or help Pekr's and the rest of our 
curiousities.  I normaly would not respond but Reichart's commnets 
struck a nerve with me: "I'm tired of offierng some info, and then 
having snide comments made..." If your comments are as useful as 
the one you made to start this tread, please just refrain.  Let''s 
move on...

I hope too we will soon see some new blog, or some alpha release 
to enjoy a bit of a bug hunting, playing with new toy ... you know 
that feeling, right? :-)

ahhh, expectation managment ...  I am a terrible example of how to 
correctly do that myself ... if you bug me it will take longer and 
I will be unpleasnt in the meanwhile. but it does give me breathing 
room

Of course, you don't have to. But a strong community is a strong 
selling point these days. But strong communitys don't come for free, 
you have to work hard to get them.

Now, there already is a small - but nevertheless strong - community 
around Rebol .... just don't kill it.

Reichart appears to no longer be a member of this world.....hence 
the None against all his posts.

Whether that's a bug, a deliberate choice on his part, or some other 
reason is not obvious.

But if you want to address him, this is not currently a working channel 
for that purpose.

Probably any further discussion of that belongs in the !altme group.

My opinion is, that it is not me, who was off base, but it was Reichart's 
comment, which was simply inappropriate imo. But I talked to Reichart 
later privately, and he talked normally to me. It was also me, who 
reacted with explanation of my points. Well, while I used "Could 
someone please ask Carl", I used bold style, which could sound like 
I ordered RT to post a blog. I decided to use bold letters because 
sometimes the discussion here scrolls so fast, that I want it to 
be noticed by folks like Gabriele, who might connect later. btw - 
I still can see Reichart with his name here ....

Well, historically, there is one thing which is interesting. RT's 
communication nowadays is 100% better, than it was during IOS days. 
During all that long years, I received various messages from various 
community members, supporting my point of view. I also sometimes 
asked, why that person does not state it publicly, and the answer 
often was the fear, that it is inappropriate and that such persons 
could be kind of persecuded, or that their reputation in the eyes 
of RT could be lowered. I of course remember very well my overreactions, 
and there is not excuse for such.


But - I like things being communicated. I don't like ppl passing 
by one each other, with heads down, eyes not meeting. I can criticise, 
and I can accept critique. I like the fresh air, not hiding of problems.


I am just like that - "I don't fear dragons." As for me, I even don't 
feel offended by Terry's views. I can understand both sides pov, 
and mostly what we are spending hours with here in such regard, is 
already being a wrong kind of communication. Instead of someone asking 
privately - hey, Terry, dude, what is problem in your opinion, we 
call for official user.r agendas non english man can't even properly 
follow :-) Well, whatever, I am staying ;-)

A new blog entry -- and related to R3 too :-)
http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0096.html

I was leaving thart one as a pleasant surprise for Petr to discover 
for himself :-)

Yup, communication is almost everything. I'm working at a small company 
right now, about 10 people, and even here most problems can be tracked 
down to mis(sing) communications. 
THat should tell you something

latest R3 alpha, which came a few hours ago has:

- built in VID
- built in HTTP
- more undocumented features
- about the same amount of documented features as last alpha
- dll file is 262 kb
- exe file is 336 kb


There are 225 bugreports in our database, of which perhaps half are 
fixed. Two reports were added today.

That's my status update for now. :-)

So what is the story with Alpha?  Are we getting a beta anytime soon. 
 I haven't heard the latest eta on some of these distros.

btw - I had an idea, nothing concrete, but - could it be possible 
to build styles in complete visual style, almost without coding? 
Imagine visual style builder. You basically would have container 
and you would be able to place gobs there. You would have also available 
palette of handlers, which you could kind of plug into your container. 
Then you would have available testing methods for dragging, mouse 
moving, and test how your style reacts. It would kind of remind Photoshop 
work with layers. It would create tree structure and then it would 
compose a style for you as a resul, with minimal coding effort. Just 
not sure it would be possible. But - for new VID, you guys should 
thought in such an abstract way to make it possible :-)

ah, it's so nice to be designing a progress bar with sub-pixel precision. 
:-)

no, it's handled with scaling pairs up 10x. So a 500 px progressbar 
has a 5000 pixel resolution.

you can do it in R2 draw as well:

draw [scale 0.1 0.1 box 100x100]

draws a box that appears to be 10x10

draw [scale 0.1 0.1 box 99x99]

draws a box that appears to be 9.9x9.9

No, there are some things still missing. I'm not even sure that a 
port can be warranted as the system is very different, so it would 
take shorter time to rewrite it. I have long wanted to rewrite it 
to separate list operations from the display more.

A little update from alpha testing, which I joined about a week ago:

- Carl managed two releases today, the last one added a request-file.

- I've been working on some very thorough 64-bit decimal testing, 
and I found a couple of bugs. Better to find them now than after 
a public release.

- I made a little program to help getting a view on the alpha situation. 
(tests, bugs, etc.)

- I just had a talk with Carl, and he has some more to say about 
testing. He has a test script, that was used for VID2, that he wants 
to get running under R3. It should make it easier for all the testers 
to get more done faster. Testing this is big project, but there is 
progress all the time. Just 4 updates to the bug tracker yesterday, 
but more than 20 updates the day before. (Both new reports and solving/testing 
old bugs.)

i repost a comment on the last Carl's blog post:
I noticed the use of the new Rich Text Format. Bravo !!! 

will have us the possibility of including sub-blocks of text with 
inheritance of the style properties to the sub-blocks ? 

something like: [bold “bla bla” [red “i' m red”]]

Some more output from the R3 console:

>> length? system/words
== 1296

>> ? system/datatypes

SYSTEM/DATATYPES is a block of value: [end! unset! none! logic! integer! 
decimal

! percent! money! char! pair! tuple! time! date! string! binary! 
file! email! ur

l! tag! issue! bitset! unicode! vector! image! block! paren! path! 
set-path! get

-path! lit-path! dictionary! datatype! typeset! word! set-word! get-word! 
lit-wo

rd! refinement! native! action! routine! rebcode! op! closure! function! 
frame!

object! module! error! task! port! gob! event! handle! struct! library! 
utype!]

>> ? system/view/event-types
SYSTEM/VIEW/EVENT-TYPES is a block of value: [

    ignore interrupt device custom error init open close connect accept 
    read write wrote lookup ready done time show hide offset resize active 
    inactive minimize maximize restore move down up alt-down alt-up aux-down 
    aux-up key key-up scroll-line scroll-page drop-file
]

Steeve: sub blocks are possible in DRAW but not with TEXT (it complicates 
a bit caret handling; we may add that in the future but so far we 
have not needed them).

Ah, 14.8.? That was btiffin's birthday IIRC, it was posted on announce 
channel as a joke ... well, call it kind of a black humour :-)

it would be said that everyone is filled with enthusiasm for this 
history of cursor icon.
One will strike me if I say that it is the last of my concern? 

i could make a wish list with 1000 request for R3, and changing cursor 
icon would not be inside

1000 is a little bit excessive, i admit ;-)

There are a lot of things rebol does that I would not think I needed 
but as they are there...I use them. I would not have thought much 
about the curser but I'm sure that I will use it to help rebol apps 
standout.

The cursor demo was done about a month ago, so that issue was solved 
then. Using different cursors is in active use in the GUI.

but with postscript, we might be able to get a decent preview in 
draw

I'm not suggesting writing a postscript interpreter ...

I remember, in SAP, they had their SAP Script - the tool you used 
to do your forms for printing. They left it, and integrated PDF instead. 
I wonder if the requirement for PDF reader is problem for you? I 
know it is a dependency, but it is imo being regarded de-facto standard, 
no?

I guess the question is whether one wants to use pdf as a print preview 
mechanism . or use draw

Umm, it's not directly R3 related, but I think Gabriele's PDF-Maker.r 
is a fairly large step toward cross-platform printing.  It's three 
flavour right now, pdf-maker.r in rebol.org, pdf-maker version 2 
on Gabriele's site (the target for future work and with some wicked 
powerful REBOL directed typesetting) and inside the rebol.org qml-ed 
package with the ease of qml input, pumping out pdf.


V2 at http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/is where x-platform 
printing may come from, methinks.

except this commits us to using a 3rd party viewer

graham: previewing ps is as hard as previewing pdf, as long as the 
source is a rebol dialect.

graham: i don't know any user whit gs installed. every single pc 
i have ever seen has a pdf reader of some kind installed (usually 
just adobe)

I'm personally more interested in using Windows printing directly 
and feed data to that. I don't know yet though how that works, but 
I'll be working on a solution for that for R3.

right now I'm stuck in a mix of GS, Printfile and using postscript.r 
to generate printable output.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to kick Pekr for making me think 
the 14th was THE DAY!  :>)  LOL

it was a joke, of course. The bad part of the joke, which makes it 
joke a less, is the fact I dared to post it to Announce channel :-)

REBOL/View 1.3.2.3.1 5-Dec-2005 Core 2.6.3
Copyright 2000-2005 REBOL Technologies.  All rights reserved.
REBOL is a trademark of REBOL Technologies. WWW.REBOL.COM
>> x: 1.0 while [(1.0 + (x / 2.0)) > 1.0] [x: x / 2.0]
== 1.77635683940025E-15

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002 Service Pack 2   Compaq 
Presario AMD Athlon XP 2200+  1.80 GHz  1.00 GB of RAMS

A little update from Alpha testing. Since last time, this happened:

- POWER can now handle negative number and exponent

- Some bugs fixed regarding: money!, path, VID crash, change/part, 
read, function and closure recursion crash, compose/deep
- New dictionary! datatype (replacing hash!)
- A lot is going on in the graphics, VID and DRAW groups
- Ongoing work to get the test methods to perfection

We're now on Alpha 49.

Carl asks about better name for dictionary!, which is a bit long. 
I think there is only one alternative, if we want the name to be 
on pair with other languages - dict! ... the thing is, that we don't 
use abbreviations in REBOL most of the time, but we have func too, 
so why not dict! ?

and I don't like percents. I don't want to open that discussion here, 
because I already seen some discussion on it, and while it might 
seem trivial, it is not :-) But generally I refuse result which is 
different from what I got from calculator. So basically how following 
could be valid escapes my basic school knowledge:

12.3 * 110% = 13.4


Of course I would expect 12.3 + (10% from the base (12.3)) = 13.53, 
which is returned also by my Windows calculator. Even if I think 
about 110% as of 1.1, still 12.3 * 1.1 = 13.53.

IMO there is a bug in the doc :-)

that's a docs problem, let me fix it...
r3 works as your calculator, Pekr :)
>> 12.3 * 110%
== 13.53

Also remember that main purpose of percent is to enhance sematics 
in dialects and not to work as a calculator. But you're free to write 
your own calculator dialect.

Maybe best to think of the $ as a BCD specifer rather than specifically 
a money one. 
   to-bcd: : to-money
  for all other uses :-)

Using $ as a BCD specifier wouldn't be so bad if 'print ignored it. 

>>print join weight ["mg"]
== $123.45678mg