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I think actually there should be a limit to how far you can go back, 
otherwise one might encourage people to make hard to read code.

Hmmm,  I'd love a 'get-stack and 'restore-stack. Who needs continuations....

I'm not sure this will be last-expression-result.  I think it will 
be restricted to last-console-result.  afaik.  But a short-cut for 
last-expression-result could make for more codie looking code.  :)

I don't think it would make a difference if it were in console or 
in code. I think that being able to go one result back in code would 
be highly useful, but it should be done in a readable way.

a word like 'previous could do that

ah, that is not the same ... you don't want to obtain expression, 
but a result ....

All good ideas gentlemen.  For the way I work (lazy and forgetful) 
I'd prefer not to have to type system/console/last-result if we can 
convice Carl to make it nice and short like  recent  or  answer  
or ans or just  or anything along the six or less character typing 
range.  Plus if there is no shift-key involved, that'd be a bonus 
(meaning if we pick a symbol to suggest, I'd prefer backtick over 
tilde)

I think I'd prefer something that's easily readable, rather than 
a symbol - so 'lastres (for Last Result) is my suggestion

Kinda joking, but not,  last-evaluated-expression  lee  Has a sheltered 
feel to it and is a wine-makers word.  And then we could pay homage 
to The Bare Naked Ladies and call R3, Gordon.  :)

But I'll stop joking...this will be a very handy feature and doesn't 
deserve me clownin' around.  These are all good ideas.  And I think 
the fact of showing interest may move it closer to reality in R3. 
 Right now it is just a suggestion that got the nod of being possible.

Izkata I agree about readability.  A symbol may suffer abusive 'coding' 
practice if it ends up being last-expression and not just last-console-expression 
and then people do use the feature in scripts.

:)  My concern for readability would be avoiding REBOL code starting 
to look like perl, where you have to decipher while reading.  Coded 
code is fine for things like C, J and R but REBOL has a very nice 
quality of being grok'ed at a glance.  Losing that would be sad. 
 ICarii said it best already ... let's not go there.  So I'd almost 
like to restrict the new feature to last-console-expression just 
so we don't go overboard with short-cut expressions in scripts.  
Thinking along those lines, perhaps system/console/last-result would 
be fine.  Developers could add .: or `: or ~: to personalize for 
console work.  Then again, system/console/last-result wouldn't want 
to be set for evey expression.  Just when needed, so it'd have to 
be an action, not a data set.


Ingo;  Wow.  As I was typing...you were echoing the same thoughts.

Well, REBOL is all block/series based .... and series is a "queue" 
of values. I would like to have stack of values (block of values), 
series, which we can pick-up from, sort, move, remove - no ackward 
one only value!

Petr; A lot of this comes down to what is going to cost the REBOL 
evaluator.  I don't know, but have a feeling that a lot of intermediate 
results are discarded.  Could be wrong.  But if so, I wouldn't push 
for anything that will slow down current execution speed.  If the 
values are there on a stack today, great.  But II'd guess that only 
the last may easily (and zero cost to current run-time) accessible. 
 And with some fancy expressions, what goes on the stack in what 
order may be optimized differently than reading code left to right. 
 I'll ask while pointing out the interest that has been shown here 
by the group.  If coders want a pickable list of expressions today 
we have reduce and friends.  I'm more aiming to get at the last result 
from the console as I'm always forgetting to put a var: in front 
of test code, especially code tthat returns an object! that I'd like 
to probe.

Kaj;  :)

The request for this feature has become more formal.  Mr. Hawley 
put in the ticket.  He has an excellent grasp of upcoming security 
and threading issues and worded the request accordingly.  The request 
went   in as system/console/last.  That could change and it's still 
only a request; but there it is.

not usable from within a script?

That's still a question, but I'd guess console, as part of the display 
result sequence...maybe?

usable within a script

 would just slow things down, as there's no reason to use it at all.

to save allocating a local variable ?

Then can't you just compound the two lines and save a carriage return 
as well ;-)

Just wondering if there is any point in having a result stack we 
can push results onto and then use?  Is that faster than using local 
variables?

there must be a penalty in creating variables in terms of memory 
allocation, and deallocation

Does the new draw have a concept of current position on the canvas?

it would make it easier to do typesetting if we had a currentposition 
command as in postscrip

could probably make a type setting dialect around that. many new 
dialects are possible.

there is currently a dialect extension to make draw drawings automatically 
resizable.

graham, do you know if there is such a dialect for R2?

porting to the iphone/ipod is one thing i would try :) (my brother 
has an ipod touch). but, i'm not sure apple would allow a programming 
language in...

It'll be interesting to see what exactly they allow. Not being specific 
enough in this area worries me a bit, so we can't tell whether it's 
going to be completely free, but has to be approved by Apple, or 
if only the big boys with the big money are allowed to play.

Forinstance, my Cerebrus anti-spam script regularly ran out of resources 
and crashed after a week or so, so I was wanting to reboot it once 
a day as it were to prevent that happening.

a bit more progress on DevBase today to allow uploading of many files 
in bulk. still a few more bits to do. DevBase will hold the code 
to itself, so we can help updating it along the way.

there are now a few extra useful mezzanines that haven't been added 
to R3 officially. perhaps they will go in there as well.

http://hmkdesign.dk/rebol/files/2e7e2c962a9c8d14e93919f5b007e5f6-85.html
<-- a small blurp about DocBase

I really don't undersant why there is so many people crying... I 
have Uniserve runing for several months without problems, parsing 
about 50 pages two times per day to provide culture informations 
in the city I live, I use Rebol to build PHP sites, Flash apps, as 
a proxy server as, a clasic system console and for so many every 
day scripting and I really cannot imagine I would use something else 
than Rebol for such a job. And if you still think that you cannot 
do anything in R2 and have to wait for R3 to start, you can take 
a look for other technology. With computer languages it's same like 
with normal languages - the more languages you know, the better you 
are.

Our community was always passionate, but not big enough. Each nice 
and good project was mostly a one-man show. Then - those more skilled 
rebollers got rebol related jobs. That is very nice, but also has 
some side-effects. Those ppl nearly vanished from public radar. Where's 
Doc, Cyphre, Ladislav, Gabriele, Voker, Anton? Well, Gabriele could 
be probably excluded from the group, as he is active even on ml.

I just had a though this morning about just how different R3 is going 
to be syntactically from R1-R2. For those of you using it, is it 
grossly different? I think I should just continue to study the current 
Rebol since I still have plenty of jobs to do, however, I'm still 
curious what it looks like myself. Personally I doubt if it can be 
so new that what I've learned so far will not be useful but I'd like 
to hear it from those who have real-world experience.

No the syntax is basically the same. There are no radical changes 
to syntax, but in the details, some things behave a little differently, 
some things are allowed and some are forbidden, but you only notice 
that after a while. If you use R2, you'll be able to use R3 immediately. 
The differences lies in the behavior of functions, dialects, etc.

move: func [
    "Move a value or span of values in a series."
    source [series!] "Source series"
    offset [integer!] "Offset to move by, or index to move to"
    /part "Move part of a series"
    length [integer!] "The length of the part to move"

    /skip "Treat the series as records of fixed size" ;; SKIP redefined
    size [integer!] "Size of each record"

    /to "Move to an index relative to the head of the series" ;; TO redefined
] [
    unless length [length: 1]
    if skip [
        offset: offset * size: max 1 size
        length: length * size
    ]
    part: take/part source length
    insert either to [at head source offset] [
        system/words/skip source offset
    ] part
]

not much difference, except for a new TAKE function. but there shouldn't 
be any trouble reading it for R2 users.

but it did take a while for me to discover 'unless. There has also 
been debate whether it's needed. It makes code a very tiny bit faster. 
That's all.

>>>> head foreach [a b d: c] a [change d 'hello]
== [1 2 hello 4 5 hello]

>> a: [1 2 3 4 5 6]
>> head foreach [a b d: c] a [change d 'hello]
== [1 2 hello 4 5 hello]

posted a bit more about it on my blog.

Will users need  a pro type license to access libraries?

well, I won't be making it. :-) I think these questions are better 
suited for later. I need to have a better look at devbase. I suspect 
(sorry, Terry) that it will be a 3rd party job.

henrik, some bugs in your former blog, it might confuse ppl:


1) "Knowing FOREACH from R2, you can assign a word to each of those 
4 elements " .... while your block shows only [a b c]
2) >> a: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9]
== [1 2 3 4 5 6]

...is wrong too - you miss 7 8 in the ==[] block returned from console 
...

What a great faq Henrik. Thanks.

Ohh, sorry : ) Wasn't thinking straight. (I am working on a PC, you 
know)

some things are still outside of the R3 distribution, so it might 
balloon a few more kb.

Still incredible, don't you think? So this thing might really work 
on a cellphone/pda?

Henrik, you know I am a big PS3 fan. How big of a deal would it be 
to port?

I don't know yet much about the porting process, but so far it looks 
like a "fill in the blanks" process, where you need to provide functionality 
for events, timers, threads, etc. That and the documentation for 
whatever OS runs on the PS3. If Linux can run on it, R3 should work 
fine.

It does so I hope that means my next "Amiga" will be a PS3.

The executable size of all versions of REBOL is absolutely tiny.
But the memory footprint when loaded runs into megabytes.

That used to be a showstopper for memory-limited devices such as 
phones/pdas.

It may no longer be if the minimum hardware has caught up with REBOL's 
memory requirements.

That's a very promising statistic!

I don't know how much memory an R2 face takes, but a single empty 
GOB in R3 takes 64 bytes.

Well, the proof will be in the pudding. When we get to the point 
where we can run R3 on a Nokia device, we'll know.

I don't do many benchmarks either right now, because my only windows 
box is a 192 MB Celeron 500 that will only boot in fail safe mode 
without graphics acceleration. However it probably is a good thing, 
since it really shows that graphics are noticably faster. That will 
help lowering the system requirements.

(in a new R3 session)

I'm on Windows.. I've managed to make a small program that communicates 
with the device (it's a small OLED display on my laptop) in C++, 
but it would be much more fun to write it all in Rebol

Henrik, I spy a little list-view there!  : ) Very nice.

You know, that devbase seems like a very useful tool for personal 
application development as well. Any plans for releasing it for that 
reason? I imagine it tracks uploaded files

DevBase holds DevBase.  It's an open development environment.  I'm 
never too clear on plans, but I was told early on that I could plan 
to host a copy on my website when it's ready.  So (without being 
100%), I'd say yes it'll be a very nice personal or group REBOL development 
app.

james_nak: personal application development: perhaps it may be useful 
for this, but I don't see it working that well for organizing source 
files. however, I'm cooking something up in this area, because I 
need something like that for myself. it will not be a part of devbase.

Henrik you got me thinking about coming up with something myself. 
One thing that would be cool would be something like what we used 
to have on the Amiga. I think it was Mountftp or ftpmount or something 
like that. You could use it just like a drive/folder.

I want to create a simple version of XCode. I like how it operates, 
but it won't be a direct copy of it.

Pretty cool looking. I just need a better way to organize my stuff.

Some serious memory usage here in Ladislav's spelling corrector which 
is also in RebGUI

Script: "Spelling Corrector" (none)
loading and initializing(500kb dictionary)...

{somue spelin wordz tu tepst. Fur szore azd seren yaars aga, our 
fatheers brougt fourth on this lans a new natiun.}
some 10605095
spell 25275846
words 25615457
to 25928767
test 25275846
fur 25415461
swore 25755072
and 26071006
seen 26410617
years 26750228
ago 27066162
our 27205777
father 33781190
brought 34123425
fourth 34263040
on 34402655
this 34542270
lane 34860828
a 35000443
new 35140058
nation 27291974

0:00:04.717

For those not being on r3-alpha world. R3 development was "resumed". 
Not that it was halted, but I hade private chat with Carl for few 
days, and we got into agreement into how to proceed. I wonder, if 
I am working as an marketing RT guy already? :-) Well, it was nice 
and realistic chat. We identified, that priorities have to be sorted. 
And I suggested Carl to blog about it. Developers were polled for 
the priorities, and we found out, that there are mostly two groups:


- one that prefers View/VID plus schemes being done, so that ppl 
can continue with their app development

- and the other group, who would like to have surrounding infrastructure 
implemented. You probably will not be surprised I belong to this 
group :-) 


As for infrastructure, I simply asked Carl, if we get any improvement 
to dll component, and he admitted, that that might be task for us, 
using plug-in API - simply a cleaner and abstracted aproach. But 
- in order for plug-ins to work, we need modules. So - the next focus 
is to get module system working. It is a logical step imo.


RT working on modules does not mean VID should be halted. VID (whole 
View) will be most probably fully open source, so it is more of a 
community aproach. Ah, and we were scared a bit by consideration 
of dropping of R3. Due to architecture changes for R3, Rebcode might 
not be so fast as in R2, but developers said their NOOOOOO, so I 
hope Rebcode will come too in some form :-)


Ah, and as developers complained a bit about rebol console, Carl 
said well then, as you wish, and uploaded C source code for stdio 
device into DevBase.


Guys, my belief is, that things will start to move faster and faster 
with DevBase and cooperation.


Disclaimer: none of above is direct quote from my talks with Carl. 
It is just my understanding of current situation ....

Steeve;  Sunanda uses it in his world class index builder SKIMP. 
 rebol.org  skimp.r  It's a heady read I might add.  After giving 
it a glance ask yourself if Sunanda cut his teeth on personal computers 
or Big Iron.  :)

'alter is short for  'alternate (ie alternate between two states).

It's a shorthand way to add an item to a series if it is not there, 
or remove it if it is.

I may create strange data structures, but I use 'alter all the time.

Hi Anton, did you 'source 'alter?

alter: func [

    {If a value is not found in a series, append it; otherwise, remove 
    it.} 
    series [series! port!] 
    value 
    /local temp
][

    either temp: find series value [remove temp] [append series value]
]

So, you'd better off with:

if not find block item [append block item]

But I think, that the return value of alter is less than usefull, 
There's no way of knowing, whether the value has been added or removed 
... other than doing a 'find on it afterwards ... ;-)

a proposal of a refinement for alter:
alter/count 

increment a value instead of add/remove it, return the total count 
for this value.
>> alter/count [] 'a
== 1
>> alter/count [a 1] 'a
== 2

Instead of ALTER functionality I use this quite a lot... but I'm 
not sure I would use funtion with refinement for this as I use it 
in loops where speed is important.

These alter-count functions aren't taking R3 into account. Most of 
these key/value usage patterns will be handled by the map! type in 
R3.
; alter-count, just code since it's too simple for a function
key-counts/:key: 1 + all [key-counts/:key 0]

The trick is that you can't remove keys, but if you assign none to 
the map at a given key the effect is the same.

The general pattern in R3 is that none is the equivalent of missing 
data. Pick off the end of a series returns none too.

Recovering from a none is easier and more efficient than recovering 
from an error. Series bounds are just an implementation detail anyways, 
when you have series that can autoexpand.

Does that mean I won't be able to build the equivalent of an R2 hash! 
with map! in R3?


I use a hash! to build a unique list of words as it was far quicker 
than any other method I could come up with.

Yeah, hash! has been replaced with map!, which is faster but more 
specialized. You could either use block!, assign true to the map! 
at the word key, or keep a word count.

Thanks for the suggestions: I think that I'll have to use  a map! 
with a dummy value as using a block! was too slow.

I should have figured... December is a slow month

Yes, but does this mean that R3 as a running system will not be available 
in DevBase for several more months?

As I think I've mentioned (a million times) I would want those estimates 
never to be published. They are wrong 99% of the time anyway.

That's what I, and we, asked here a few months ago. There are still 
promises being made

Ok, currently the latest build provides support for modules, but 
some tests need to be done on that. There are also some discussions 
on how to do proper testing. We're not good testers. Now Carl is 
working on unicode and how R3 should support it. There is also talks 
about a document which provides the real roadmap to R3, but I don't 
think it's done.

Parts of R3 being in DevBase is useless if there is no dev release 
to work with. Such a dev release was promised for last month, and 
then early this month. Is it still going to happen?

VID3 as a base, is based upon stronger foundation than VID2, that 
is clear even now ... but it needs to be more complete. I think that 
such things as release schedule should be well planned.

I said the previous time that I don't blame any of you. I'm just 
trying to get a straight answer to a simple question

will we have a pre-release of view even without VID3, because i have 
some projects that use a homemade VID ?

As I have written to the mailing list: dear collegues, use R2 and 
do not wait for R3. It will be a gift of God when it will come. If 
we put R3 developers under pressure there is the probability that 
wrong choices will be made.

Anyone is free to consider my opinion the way they want. I'll sure 
you understand my posts are written with good intentions and not 
to start a flame.

Please read one or two months back in this thread for that. I said 
a lot about it

It may seem that I'm putting the pressure on, but this longwinded 
situation has put a lot of pressure on me to defend REBOL in these 
projects

Several people have agreed that REBOL needs a platform to be the 
language for, and this situation puts it in jeopardy of missing these 
particular boats

Ask for Rebol3 in every place and force the developers to answer 
about a release date or...

Assume as FACT that Rebol 3 is in late and won't come so soon as 
expected and start a collaborative approach torwards the work of 
developers and the whole project in general ?

Kaj, I have already read it and I agree with you: it is a Rebol Tech 
problem. It is better for us knowing no release date at all. I'll 
never ask it as I have learn to work on what we already have and 
not on what will there be in the future.

Next year

 for me could be even 2009 to go out of alpha/beta but then I am sure 
 it will be a good implementation and not one produced under pressure. 
 However we must have an adult approach to the release date problem: 
 now we know that Carl has the defect of giving release date the team 
 can't respect...