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Brian: you are a saint!

None of the Library stuff needs guru level skills.  Just some gentle 
persistence to get lots of little details right.

Sunanda, would it be possible in the library to use Gabriele's PDFMaker 
HTML doc CSS style sheet for displaying script code ?

I find it realy beautifull. It realy turns reading code into a visual 
aesthetic experience.

For those who never visit the Mailing List: Brian has stepped up 
to the mark and is a member of the Library Team.....He's going great 
work already:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-display-message.r?m=rmlVPCC

Thanks.

Basically, we use this code of Carl's when displaying a script in 
color:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=color-code.r

Thogh we've adapted it for CSS and  a couple of other minor tweaks.
What we are lacking is beautiful CSS :-)

i don't think my CSS is very good, I know Chris could make it 10x 
better. but until someone does a better one... i have something to 
use :)

I have a function that I'd like to add to the Library that takes 
some user data (could be from CGI query, or from View fields), processes 
and validates it according to a given spec, eg. [word "2007/4/30"] 
-> [word: date!] -> [word 30-Apr-2007]  I've named this function 
'import, but I realise that %import.r may be too generic a script 
name for the Library.  Any suggestions?

mask-import

 ?  Your validator seems general but I presume you made it for a specific 
 purpose.

It's still a reasonably generic function.

Assuming you don't just validate, but also load the data according 
to the filter, then coerce might be a good name:
  coerce [date! "1 jan 2007"] ==> 1-jan-2007

Sort of, I have a helper function 'as that acts as 'coerce.  The 
meat of this script is filtering a block of [word! any-type!] values.

Give us a "C"....give us an "h"   ... Sorry, Deja-vu  :)
Thanks again Chris.

Halfway there, just need to add a quick explanation...

%datascreen.r  %screening.r?  Naming is fun.  %filtered-import.r 
is nice too.


Note to everybody:  If you haven't, check out Chris's %form-date.r, 
newly in the library...
Chris's func'ies are funky, and a nice learn.

Can I upload a ZIP archive in the Library or does it require to upload 
only a single REBOL script ?

(the zip would be opened and converted to a package btw) its just 
sooo easy to prepare a zip file.

If there was a standard REBOL library that could open *any* common 
zip format, then yes: it'd be easy to accept a zip upload and turn 
it into a package.
Otherwise, it'd be a support headache.
***

The current method of uploading package files (via a browser interface) 
is itself a headache. But (this is where I toss the ball back to 
you Maxim), LDS (the Library's API) supports package file uploading. 
So *you* could write an easy package assembly routine to run on the 
contributor's computer. Problem solved!

It could even work from a zip file, so no server scripts need be 
harmed in the writing of it :-)

There's a lot that can be done to make the Library easier to use 
without waking up the Librarians :-)

Thanks Sunanda. I wasn't aware one could define it's own CSS for 
library code display.


However Gabriele's emitter has very usefull tags that are missing 
in the current library emitter. In particular, it is posible to highligh 
differently standard Rebol words and new words. This is extremely 
usefull for a beginner like me who doesn't yet know all of Rebols 
vocabulary. There is also the TAB tag that helps a lot.


Unfortunately, writing a new emitter using Gabriele's code is beyond 
my ability.


And from the dreamer in me... here is a suggestion for this better 
emitter: 

When one clicks (or maybe hover) on one of the standard Rebol words, 
you are presented with it's definition.

That's a nice idea for a sort of "REBOL explainer" application.
But it would be difficult to do in the Library.

The Library does attempt to load and parse scripts -- that's how 
we do the colorisation. But (as with Gabriele's code) we rely on 
REBOL's own reflective abilities to tell us what is a word, function, 
operator etc.

The Library runs an old version of Core (and even if we update that, 
we'd never run a version of View on a webserver) so it does not have 
access to all the information a proper explainer.highlighter would 
need.
Take this script for example:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?color=yes&script=reboldiff.r

'new-line is a valid REBOL word, but it is not colored: that's because 
it is not a word in the version we use.

So sadly, the colorisation at REBOL.or remains a nice bit of eye 
candy rather than a solidly dependable feature.

That's true -- not something we could do safely on a server.....Hence 
we are limited to load/header etc.

A desktop application may be able to be more daring -- provided you 
don't let arbitrary code out of the sandbox.

I understand about the "Rebol Explainer" app. ... maybe someday in 
a Rebol IDE.


But are the enhancements "à la Gabriele" still possible (i.e. Keywords, 
Words, and Tabs tags ) ?

Jean: did you try overing on a bold word in my output? :)

Sunanda: i keep the list of know words external to the script. there's 
a link to it from the html doc i posted (look for the #include directive 
and click on it). there's also a script that generates that file 
(apache directory index is enabled for that dir, so you'll be able 
to see it there)

Gabriel -- Thanks....A word list sounds a good way to go.
***

Jean-Francois -- a hover-over on kewords is certainly do-able and 
could look fun for the first couple of minutes on colorised scripts. 
Though it has drawbacks:
** it'd just about double the size of the page

** I think I'd be serious annoyed by it after 30 seconds -- though 
that may just be me

** lots of hidden-by-css styles (that's the way I'd do it, usng some 
of Eric Meyer's clevernesses) could create confusion for anyone using 
an elderly web browser or screen reader.


A good step in the right direction would be better styles for the 
code as we display it now.....So anyone experimenting with that is 
doing us all a great service ... Amd it would pave the way by creating 
a better foundation for higher cleverness.

Gabriele, That is great !

I hadn't noticed the extra info poping up. Just that simple extra 
info is very helpful when inspecting/reading code (well for me anyway). 
Thank you.

The fact I hadn't noticed it might be a counter argument to Sunanda's 
fear of being annoyed by it. You really have to leave your pointer 
on it.


Any new language (natural or artificial) feels like "Scriptio continua" 
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua) 

at first and all these visual cues are very helpfull in building 
the program's tree in your mind.


Imagine yourself a beginner at german reading a text that would have 
been colorized to accentuate its different elements. Hovering over 
a colored word would give you a translation or even maybe just a 
picture to prevent you from thinking in your first language.

That's great Geomol.
Yes the pdf-maker docs are a good example.
I would stick with gabriele's color for a start.

Gregg, the Tiscali server (or network) was a bit slow last night. 
Try the links again, if you had trouble.

You guys can also think about, how many different colors are needed 
(preferred), when displaying REBOL source. A color for comments, 
values, datatypes, words, etc. Should values be split into numeric 
values, series and others with each their color. Other things?

personally id go for minimalist hilighting with colouring only for 
comments and strings - any more than that and it starts to look like 
a fairground -)

I programmed in COBOL for many years without coloring. Then I started 
using vim, and I found, it looked weird with all those colors. After 
a while, I started to really like it, because it's so much easier 
to read the code. Colors make our brains look and distinguish components 
much better than words. I'm for colors. But they have to be balanced, 
so it doesn't hurt the eyes too much.

Good points.  And Charles had some trouble with 'printouts'.  :) 
 I stopped following
the progress quite a few years ago.

I prefer the color-code scheme over the VIM scheme (don't like the 
pink), but as long as it isn't too bright most anything should be 
OK. 


It would be interesting to do some research on using different rendering 
schemes for code, based on activity. For example, when writing and 
maintaining code, I like comments in gray, so they "fade out" a bit; 
but if you're reading code, in a Literate Programming sense, you 
probably want the prose to stand out and the code to be subordinate.

Or if you're looking for specific datatypes, have a hot-key that, 
when pressed, highlights them.

I've thought that same thing a few times.  A "gork" button.

Ooooh, a grok button. I like that.

First example with test of colors: http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/example.html

My idea is to build an example, that satisfies the need. Then I look 
at implementation for the Library, so sources in the library can 
be viewed this way.


Maybe refinements shouldn't be that yellow!? Should background be 
a little gray like this? #f9f9f9 Or should it be white? The purple 
and blue might be a bit too bright compared to the red and green? 
Or should the red and green be brighter?

OS X has a default palette of rather bright colors for highlighting 
to choose from, suggesting the text colors to be dark, so the text 
still can be read when selected.

Nice set of subtle colours!

On my Win-based machine,  all selected text is the same colour....white 
text on dark blue (though that is configurable)
***

A thought: if instead of FONT tags  you could switch to CSS. Then 
your experiments could use the same class names as the Library. Implementing 
that as your personal CSS on REBOL.org would be trivial

I have to say that comments should be light gray, a web common practice.

Yes, I'm trying that out with gray comments. A good idea. Should 
known words (the words REBOL deliver in system/words as default) 
be green or blue, now comments aint blue?

I find when I have to correlate something to colours or  patterns 
it is better to start with the patterns first.


Since there are really only a few colours people can distinguish 
against white (or black) we can just like them hour:

Black = Structure, brackets, etc.
Gray = Comments
Dark blue 
Light blue
Red 
Pink
Purple
Dark green
Light green
Brown
Orange
Yellow (perhaps)

More subtle colours cause confusion.  

You also have Bold and Italics to consider.

I would use these to show "new" items (bold).
Also, you can do white on colour (BG).

In ConText, I use bold+blue for for branching and a few other important 
funcs (if, either, all, etc.), navy for other funcs, green for datatypes, 
red for numbers, dark red for strings, gray for comments; brackets 
are dark gray, but go black to show matching pairs when you're on 
one.

My thinking behind the bold+blue was driven by the concept of cyclomatic 
complexity (McCabe), and making things jump out that indicate complexity 
in code. I know if I see a lot of bold+blue stuff on the screen, 
I either need to think real hard, or rewrite it. :-)

I  auto generate the  words so when a new rebol comes out I can notice 
if a word I happen to use already has a builtin purpose

Regarding my css "Suggested standard" in the Libarary, I think, the 
red for values is a bit too dark. Also the orange for refinements 
seem a bit too light.

Meaning  yep  with a big smiley  :)

Once you've had a chance to check them I'll drop myself as 'owner'.. 
:)

Sunanda;  Kids now-a-days... :)
Don't know we owe a lot to Eno, Fripp, Manzanera...

Oh I forgot to mention Celine Dion...we owe a lot to Celine Dion 
too

Celine if you say pictures of her when she was a teenager... man... 
she'd make jaws run away in a pool!

So what are you saying?  I can't use a Celine theme for LD2?

Sunanda, does rebol.org use a Facicon? On my side none is shown. 
Would be nice to add one, as I have tens of sites opened at the same 
time and can't find rebol.org fast enough ;-)

I did one -- it's live, but it's poor -- just our top-left image, 
so too small for practical benefit.
Please -- anyone! -- do us a better one!

16x16 is (a) standard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon
I used this to create the current one:
http://www.htmlkit.com/services/favicon/

hrm...  Got a simple favicon, should I upload it to AltME's file 
sharing?

Seems like a scary direction to take favicons...

I can see a new preference...disable animated favicon.  I'm surprised 
it was a mozilla
coder that would have thought up this little distraction.

I haven't had time to review your recent handiwork, and may not until 
after next week. If you don't get any response, ping again here as 
a reminder, and thanks for all your hard work Brian.

Redirected from I'm new...javascript time


Integer date and times are a problem without some real mucking about.

Graham;  I just did a search, Gregg posted date-to-epoch in the DZone 
snippets. Along with epoch-to-date.  Looks like standard run of the 
mill world class Gregg code.  :)

If you are a member of this Altme world, then you may also have been 
a member of its predeccessors: REBOL World and REBOL2 world.

There is now a private archive of those worlds on REBOL.org:
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/aga-index.r


However, you will only see them if your REBOL.org membership profile 
says you were a member -- they were *private* worlds, so we cannot 
make the posts publicly available.

If you were a member of either world and want access to the archive, 
please just ask -- just let me know your World user name and your 
REBOL.org member name.

Let's look at bit closer at the REBOL header block and licenses. 
In the library (http://www.rebol.org), REBOL scripts have a library 
entry in the header, and it contains a field named "license" with 
about 10 different possibilities. Is it enough to specify the license 
like that, or do we have to put a license text and/or warranty in 
the header of our scripts? Not just in the library but in general. 
Does anyone know, or should we ask an attorney?

I'd like to see this as a system/standard/script field.  For rebol.org 
there could be helper forms with some common choices but I'd also 
like to see it support url! in the submission validator (although 
that may have longevity problems).


Would system/standard/script/Rights, /License and /Disclaimer (or 
Warranty) cover all the legalese?

There is big problem with rebol.org library if you are using different 
than ascii chars. I've just submited a script which contains latin2 
chars and it's not uploaded correctly as there were converted to 
utf8 (so the script will not be working correctly as the chars are 
used in parse.

I've added encoding: 'cp1252 into header... it's up to rebol.org 
now to use such an info and convert such a script into utf8 before 
displaying it in html

Thanks Oldes.

Part of the problem is that all pages served from REBOL.org are served 
as
   charset=utf-8
even if a specific needs a different charset.
We need to make that more flexible :-)

How many people use the Desktop Librarian?   If not, why?  If so, 
how?


And if the answer to the first question is more than 1, who would 
be up for a documented experiment in REBOL/Agile team development? 
 It would be starting from a 60%ish completed RebGUI app with big 
big plans (and a potential complete rewrite to fit with a could-be-soon 
Revault).  There are definite and defineable 'pieces' involved.


R2 mind.  See; I dropped the ball a few months back and need a reason 
slash motivation to restart as rebol.org is too valuable a resource 
to not.  :)

If what I know about Agile is anywhere near close, we'd also need 
a "customer" or two.  To be open, honest and critical.   But those 
individuals, while having an idea of what they want to see, can't 
really be exisiting Library Team members ... I don't think.  Any 
Library Team members not involved in dev, would be the "management"

I don't use Desktop Librarian. I'm not absolutely sure why. Maybe 
because I don't use the desktop much. And why not that? Again, not 
absolutely sure. Because it feels a little weird!? Because it needs 
a Directory Opus (from Amiga) kind of tool!?

Plus ... if you can't tell; I've read Agile, never done Agile, but 
I think it fits as a counter balance to REBOL Cowboy.  Plus ... don't 
take me using the moniker Cowboy to mean a bad thing.  It has been 
the method of many a good piece of REBOL software, just perhaps not 
what  some IT managers want to see.

John;  Gabriele posted ropus.r to the library!  :)   I think it only 
needs a change to an OPEN/WAIT to be 2.7

Hm, from dec. 1999, so not supported for a long time.

I had it running on 2.7.6 Win98.  But it required a change of an 
OPEN/WAIT to OPEN/NO-WAIT.  It's from 2001 so ...

lol, ropus.r was for Core 2.0... heh. it says a lot that it still 
works though. (not that it does anything weird.)

I haven't used it for a long time, because it's out of date WRT content.

So it's a psychological and feature problem.

Posted as a reply on REBOL.org as well.

I would like a way to search the script library for words in scripts, 
that would not return scripts that have those words in strings. I 
would use this function several times a week when researching function 
usage for my mezzanines work.

Just a search that filters out string!, file! and url! types would 
be fine. I am only interested in searching the various word and path 
types.

Read above as: Just a search that filters out any-string! types would 
be fine. I am only interested in searching any-word! and *path! types.

Hmm... How to do that?
We need to know where a particular
Maybe:
1. Read script *and* Load script
2. Visit each item in the loaded block, recursively.
3. As each item is visited, check its type.

4. Depending somewhat on type, parse (in the READed script) to the 
molded item:
4.1  If it's a series, search for the "opener", eg. block! -> "["
4.2  If it's a non-series, search for it molded.
4.3

We need to know where a particular .. value is in the original source 
string (read from file).

When I am making changes to the mezzanines, I use the script library 
for research on existing usage of these mezzanines to see whether 
anything would break. When the name of a function is a common word 
that would show up in comments or strings, this is much more difficult. 
I would also like to look for third-party functions that I can't 
remember where they are defined or their author.

We do index the files, and we have several indexes, some built by 
parsing parts of the script. So we can, usually, search for special 
parts of scripts -- like strings or comments.

Part of the difficulty is that there are some scripts that we cannot 
do a 'load or a 'load/header on - they are broken or have an incompatible 
'needs: header. So we cannot add those scripts to the sepcialised 
indexes. They need specialised handling :-)

Watch this space -- I'm fiddling with some code that may partially 
need your need.

Can't load ? Just skip it with with a warning message :) You still 
get your 99% solution.

If we can't load, we try a few tricks (like commenting out the needs: 
header and reloading).

But still, there are one ot two that we fail with. So they don't 
get as well indexed as the others...And (for the same reasons) they 
are the ones that appear in black and white even if you click the 
"view in color" link.

It's pretty easy to update a script after you've contributed it.....Use 
the [update] link to add a new version.

Yes, we also index comment lines separately. Basically, we use the 
same logic as Carl's color-code.r to analyze the parts of a script:

  http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=color-code.r

Brianh: <I am only interested in searching the various word and path 
types.>

Try this quick concept code. In REBOL.org's search box, use [b] as 
a sort-of inline refinement to limit script searches to just the 
body of a script, eg
     sing

  -- finds nearly 300 scripts which contain the string "sing"    but
    sing [b]

-- finds just three scripts that have the word-part "sing" in their 
body

Even better script searching at REBOL.org -- we've extended the "[b]" 
notation to include other parts of a script and any tags the script 
has. The search can now be highly tuned to what you are looking for:
http://www.rebol.org/boiler.r?display=introduction.html

Do you mean comments _in_ a script; or comments about a script (ie 
the discussion threads)?

Either way, yes -- check the link in my previous post for the syntax 
and some examples.

Is there something going on with packages?  I uploaded a new one 
several days ago and can't easily redownload it (for testing) - repack.r 
keeps giving me "ERROR 306:  not available right now"

It's not a clear message -- sorry......I think it is because the 
package is not set as being available for downloading:

http://www.rebol.org/package-information.r?script-name=arff-datamining.r

Not really, it's a default which is set backwards to that which many 
people would expect. Plus an unclear error message. So my apologies 
again.

Doing a search, "Author: Maxim" doesn't briing up his newest script, 
Blood.r   The author field in blood.r is the same as other scripts 
which do show up with the above search.  A search for "Liquid" does 
return blood.r.  Is this a case of "hasn't been indexed yet"?

Maxim, I have the script.  Playing with it now.  If I was directing 
this question at you I would have put it in the !Liquid group.  ;-) 
 This is a question about the behind the scenes opperations of rebol.org...

Ammon -- some of the indexing happens in the background, so can trail 
12 hours or so behind a script being updated.

In the specific case of searching for an author name, the syntax 
you need is different:
    [author//maxim olivier-adlhoch]
Help for searches is here:
   http://www.rebol.org/boiler.r?display=introduction.html

Of course my syntax was wrong.   It probably fairly common for someone 
to search the library for a specific set-word! and even if it's not, 
we definitely want to allow for it.

I expected granular indexing as well...

Thanks for the info!

Sunanada, I have another question for you.  While I was poking around 
the library earlier I noticed that I have named some of my scripts 
very poorly and would like to change the FILE: value in the header, 
which apparently just creates a new copy of the script.  Is there 
a way to remove the old script such that I really am renaming the 
script rather than uploading a new one?