AltME groups: search

>> b: []
== []
>> b/1
== none
>> b/a
** Script Error: Invalid path value: a
** Near: b/a

(...well, for some reason I remember it that way, at least.  There's 
a chance I have it confused with something else...)

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

Do we have NaN (Not A Number) defined in R3?

This page suggests that the 

internals" of R3 does have NaN defined" - how does the text suggest 
it? I, as a coauthor will try to correct the text, if it does.

(but, of course, if such a wish exists, there is always the possibility 
to put it as a wish to CureCode)

Do we know a reason why it is desirable to have decimal! NaNs?

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

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

I wrote that, I think. I got it from a IEEE 754 definition, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-1985

Think of that part of the text as a description of the floating point 
standard used by CPUs.

The IEEE754 standard reserves such a value for NaNs, overflow, etc. 
But, that does not mean, Rebol has to implement those.

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


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


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

If it's part of a standard, then I guess not. I'm guessing that languages 
like javascript implement it to make error handling of bad numbers 
easier in ways that may not be necessary for REBOL.

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

I've never felt a need for NaN, but I also haven't done symbolic 
stuff or things where I think it would help to have it as a missing 
value. I'm open to it if there's a valid case though.

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

Ladislav, I meant that I'm fine with the current model, but if someone 
presents a strong argument for it I won't discount it out of hand.

Here is an example showing a difference:


>> time-block [str: make string! 0 loop 10000 [append str "a"]] 0,05
== 0.0023125


>> time-block [str: make string! 0 loop 10000 [append str "a"]] 0,05
== 0.0024375

>> time-block [str: make string! 10000 loop 10000 [append str "a"]] 
0,05
== 0.002265625


>> time-block [str: make string! 10000 loop 10000 [append str "a"]] 
0,05
== 0.002265625

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

Is it already supported to get the output of a CLI programm executed 
via CALL?

The HTTP scheme in R3 needs a lot of work (hopefully not a full rewrite). 
That's why.

Kaj full respect to your effort, in the other hand the proxy seems 
not to be overcomplicated. it may be a good training task, in R2 
it has maybe 20 lines. question is if there is some architectual 
restriction (for example synchronous / asynchronous etc.)

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

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

I could not help but point out:


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

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


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


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

Take my notes as just another point-of-view,not a counterclaim to 
what you stated ...

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

Whether to prefer 'do-browser or do/browser - such a principle was 
not stated explicitly, so, we do not have any "guide" which one shall 
be preferred

modified? Does it stand for the logic value, returning the true or 
false, or does it stand for the return of modification date? How 
should user know?

 - the function name rarely suffices to inform the user what exactly 
 the function does. In such a case it is the task for the doc string 
 to inform the user, or, we should use two words, as described in 
 the doc.

just a note - actually, it was not get-faces, but faces-of, IIRC?

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

about is not a noun as far as I know, abs is not a noun as well...

no, my argument was, that we have a convention for naming functions

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

a law

Every variable name is a noun, in principle. Do we have to use question 
marks on all variables?

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

Every variable name is a noun, in principle.

No, you are interpreting it for us, while many of us have a different 
interpretation

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

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

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

I agree, faces should be enough, unless that is likely to be used 
for something else in the same context, in which case you can switch 
to a convention for a more elaborate name

Because it is a REBOL function naming convention, which you happen 
to not know, since you did not read it yet

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

The difference is, that when sticking to the convention, it is easier 
to find out, that:


DO is a function, PRINT is a function, GET is a function, LENGTH? 
is a function

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

the convention for functions simpy is that:
  -they should (start with) verbs

  -if using a noun, it should have some special char to imply its a 
  function. (i.e. size? vs size)

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

You would have a stronger case if you would admit that it is about 
property getters, not about nouns as such

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

While I see the WORDS-OF naming convention as coming from the C language, 
I am not a C hater to the extent to refuse it. As some noticed, it 
may even make the source code more human readable as in:

    length-of series

versus

    length? series

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

In human language, that doesn't require a different form for the 
word, but it does trigger a flag in our language sensibility that 
something odd is being said

It is funny, that it looks, that people prefer

    length-of series

to the form

    get-length series

which is starting with a verb...

when "length" is followed by a serie

Why do we need to write "length of serie" , Is that not already implicit 
?

length serie 


isn't readable.   they are two different sentences, in fact you'd 
need a comma or a semi-colon in english.

I'm ok to add "of" in Rebol as a special transparent word to help 
the reader.
>> of: func [value][:value]
to be able to write such things like:
>> length of serie

but not like a mezz, it must be fast

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

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

size is a noun as well a verb

Yes, but that is quite funny, since "size" as a verb does not mean 
what the "size?" word is supposed to mean

steeve, yes which is why adding an ! or ? at the end is an easy to 
make a difference between the noun or the verb.

that is quite funny, since 

size" as a verb does not mean what the "size?" word is supposed to 
mean"

This is what I meant by that the case of the same word being able 
to be either a verb or a noun triggers a flag in one's language sensibility

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

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

The second convention in R2 is to add the ? qualifier. Most of the 
functions this applies to return a logic value, but some return other 
values, such as LENGTH?

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

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

I think the best example of this is TYPE?. It returns the datatype, 
while you might have expected it to return a logic value. But there's 
another function with a more elaborate name, DATATYPE?, that does 
that

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

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

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


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

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


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

This decision came out of the early R3 project a few years ago, back 
when you were still taking a break from REBOL :)

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

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

I think to,  I think the rule is most usefull in cases like bind 
where we need multiple variants of a word to mean different things. 
  in such a case, the  ? should always tend toward the most obvious/usefull 
conditional safe function.   :-)

(even if it does return a value instead of true)

for example, I feel that binding?  would have been a much better 
word than bind?

since we understand that if something has a value, we might as well 
receive the value instead of just knowing that this is true.

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

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

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

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

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

    faces? face

, and not

    faces-of face


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

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

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

Guys, anyone knows if this was discussed as 'intended behaviour' 
by Carl or looks like inconsistency/bug to you?

>> a: make object! [b: []]
== make object! [
    b: []
]

>> c: make a []
== make object! [
    b: []
]

>> d: make a make object! []
== make object! [
    b: []
]

>> same? a/b c/b
== false

>> same? a/b d/b
== true

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

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

Cyphre, Something never tried before can't be categorized as a bug.
It's a feature :-)

>> d: make a make object! []
same behavior than 
>> d: append make object! [] a

But I agree, it's quite unexpected.

my mistake, same as
>> d: copy a

Hum ok, it's cleared stated then. It's a feature

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


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

OH, I see your point now.

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

There was a big discussion before it, so I would guess it's intended, 
although I'm not sure

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

Aha, that "if it is a member function" was what you meant. It is 
not, currently.

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

But, the 

    Face/faces


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

Also do we have any standart way how to specify that a script requires 
R3 in script's header?

Graham's SMTP protocol doesn't seem to have a place for them, either