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so the problem you notice is due surely to a forgot implementation 
to enum2 and enum3

I yet expose my way to think .... As many people are not playing 
the same game and as software is an industry we need to make a difference 
betwin what is donate and what is the fruit of the industry that's 
all  in fact ... People who want to choose what ever licence they 
want no body can contest this or arg a licence is better than another 
without thinking what is behind this  ...

One major point wasn't said: We need a library system to handle all 
this. I won't use code, where I need to 'do zillions of single files 
in a specific order, handle path and lookup things, need local sub-directories 
to load images etc.


I'm still using Slim on my xpeers system, because that's the only 
thing I know about that handles all this quite well. And I can tell 
you, it pays off. Something like this is required.

And libraries must be compatible. The current running RebGUI projects 
is a good example. Feedback loop is fast, releases are done often 
(thanks to Ashley) and momentum is raising.

hum having all in one file until it's not a stable release complicates 
a lot the search and find for bugs ...

if people now the code scruture it's easy for them to work with a 
sigle hudge file if people don't  know the file scruture it's hard 
for them to locate the place where they have to act (adding code, 
fixing bugs)

I agree shadwolf. The need for a library system points to the more 
general need of how to structure larger REBOL projects.

I agree, absolutely. I'd like to see something like perl-style runtime 
'require/import/use' semantics, even if it's just in a wrapped-rebol 
app.

Some remarks: wrt licensing, RP components will be BSD based. RP 
should help you jump-start and it only does that if you can use it 
in all circumstances. No need for discussion about that (how nice 
to be a benevolent dictator ;-)

Wrt library system: in time there might be a library system in RP, 
but any componet will be self-contained. Otherwise you end up being 
forced to use a bloated library whenall you need is just a small 
subset of functions.

The way it looks now is that the Viewtop in 1.3 will have a place 
that can be used by RP. This solves a lot of problems in terms of 
version managemet and accessibility.

Olivier Auverlot proposes to add its Magic! script to the Powerpack. 
Magic! is a CGI handler that dramaticaly simplify the creation of 
dynamic web site "à la" PHP.

Version 3.5 is in the pipeline and will be release soon. But doc 
is in French AFAIK, so need to be translate before.

Just did. Magic has a nice set of HTML functions but the drawback 
is that you need a daemon for session management, which won't work 
in a shared hosting env and is harder to keep alive. But is seems 
a bit more complete, so provided that you'll do the 3.5 translation 
as well I'd be happy to include it.

I need graphics support for the REBOL Powerpack reb site! If you 
have a backdrop, image, folder icon, .... please send them to me. 
See contact details here for the mail address.

is there a site for PowerPack..where I can have a look at what it 
encompasses?

I'm looking for a bunch of "certified" software that can be used 
for setting up webservers, cgi, blogs, mail, pop etc.

But a lot of us like the idea. Maybe we can sneak some info out of 
the R3 team about how best to go about it, WRT modules and such.

Is anyone in this group still interested in a more serious REBOL 
repository? May be adjunct to REBOL.org, or something else, but targeted 
at a more consistent model for libraries and modules, so things are 
easier to INCLUDE and reuse.

we are converging all prior efforts and their originators into a 
single concerted effort.

There's a new private chat group. I'll add you to it.

I'm interested, but I am afraid that I will disagree with other people 
who have different ideas about what is the best way to implement 
a library/module system - therefore I am cautious before spending 
too much time here.

I am working on a "starterpack" when I find some time. It simply 
downloads the scripts I found useful or very interesting but they 
are not really managed/organised but for I put them in different 
directories depending on their main purpose

Anton: if you are interested in "my" collection it is just one script 
with a data file and I plan to make it available via rebol.it

The script loads the data file that contains info on the files and 
how to download handle them. Archives are usually downloaded and 
unpacked. You just have to put both files in a directory and run 
the script.

or, someone with permissions please make a Power Mezz group.

To use this you need to download a bzip decompression utility, and 
then you need to download something that will untar ....

Graham, Gabriele uploaded a prebuilt version http://sourceforge.net/projects/rebol-power-mez/files/power-mezz-built-1.0.0.zip/download

That's the Power Mezz package - this is a different group.

Did someone make a web site for the Power Pack, or is it a dead project?

Looking back at the discussions, it looks like it was a similar idea 
to what the R3 group has been calling R3/Plus.

A place for community-provided library code that isn't included in 
the standard REBOL distribution.

I want to kick of some sort of simi-regular Rebol School for new 
comers.


We need to expose more people to Rebol, the best way is a 2 hour 
school online.


I'm thinking like the old days where we all jump online, but I want 
Video too!


My idea is that we would focus on a given topic, like: parse, data 
driven programming, view, etc.


Someone would be picked as the lead speaker, and someone else might 
be in charge of moderating the Chat.



People could ask for examples, and would write them up on the spot. 
 Hopefully many Rebol Experts would be on hand to throw some samples 
up.


I have about 5 newbies that really want lessons.  I know that another 
5-7 of my team would be present to help, to learn, to be friendly.

Any one else interested?
Anyone know the best way (what software) to do this?

I've seen people use a free SWF tool to generate flash movies of 
what's going on, on the desktop. is it something like that you want?

I was hopping for a broadcast video + sound, and let a moderator 
take in coming questions and give them to the lead.

Plus let others help.  Sort of a multi-prong learning venue.

It iwll be fun to have sort of a loose open convo, and just play 
with a couple of "words" or conecepts.

Nothing too heavy.  But sometimes people just need a little demo 
in real time, and also there is an energy to a bunch of people being 
around at the same time.  This will be good.  Since all are going 
to be welcome I think it may end up being 10-15 people online at 
the same time.

i did this kind of realtime coding once. i wrote a forth vm in awk 
at the #[forth-:-irc-:-freenode-:-net]. what i missed those times was a simple 
cooperative editor. it can b imagined as a whiteboard but there is 
only 1 "painting" tool is available, a cursor for writing text. (i 
was at the end of a 33.6kbps modemline those times, so i havent dared 
to dream about video :)

i gave testdrive to some cooperative editors but most of them didnt 
work at all :( and their interface was a crap anyway.

i have also tried the above mentioned vnc2swf. well.. its okay but 
thats just video... still can b a way to go, but we need some rebol 
movie editors (flash/mjpg). some1 (gregg?) at the conference mentioned 
such a thing..

Have you tried MoonEdit. It's a cooperative editor : you can be several 
editing the same text in realtime.
Funny! But not sure "usefull" can be an adjectiv.

Is this still open? I'd like to enlist, as a student.

Is this project still alive? What I would like is to develop a feeling 
for what I should master first to start programming significant applets 
in Rebol. At the present moment, Rebol looks to me like a forest 
of trees each with innumerable branches, every one of them I should 
master.

I'm wishing for a good learning roadmap, I guess.

(I'm a teacher. Does it show? ;-)

Hello Denis,


So, one of the things a group of us have been talking about is doing 
some group lessons (world wide).


We have researched some tools for making this possible.  We narrowed 
it down to Macromedia's Breeze.  In fact last week I talked for about 
2 hours with their team (meaning the people that actually designed 
and programmed it).


This week I'm talking to their OEM leads about integrating Breeze 
from Rebol into Web applications.


So our first Breeze interactive lesson will be in a few weeks is 
my guess.  WE have not idea how good it will be with more than 10 
people, and world wide, but we are going to try.


As to a road map.  Programming languages in general are difficult 
to learn in a methodical method.  Rebol being even more difficult 
(in my opinion), because learning the structure does not help very 
much.  Even learning how Rebol works is not all that usefull (compared 
to lets say Basic, or a Batching system).

I will make some simple suggestions though:


1.	Go to Rebol.com, and read what is offered there.  It actually 
is a good starting point.  Rebol Essentials" which is a PDF on the 
site is worth reading.


2.	Write your own dictionary.  Literally, pick a given word in Rebol, 
use it in a sentence.  And just work your way through all 400+ words. 
 You can do it in a few hours.  All you need to do is try to use 
it in a way the Rebol Dictionary does not use it.



3.	Build something you really want to build.  Unless you have a goal, 
working on anything is going to be boring.  Think of a utility, or 
a game that you have always wanted to understand better, or want 
to play with, and build it.  Another cool concept is to simply copy 
it from an existing version in some other language you already know, 
or that is more simple (like Basic).

I'm glad you agree that Rebol requires a different road map to learn 
than, say, C++ or Pascal, or even Prolog and such languages. I know 
a few languages, having been a programmer for a living in my younger 
days. Now I teach programming for young students starting in science 
(18 years old +)

My mastery is now more in teaching than in programming. I've thinkered 
with the idea of maybe teaching Rebol to some of our students. But 
I would have to understand it really well before tempting that. Sure 
I can learn and memorize some syntax. But C++ has something like 
40 basic instructions to master, not 400. And you can start to programm 
significant apps in C++ with a very limited set of instructions.

With Rebol, I do not see yet the "logic" or philosophy behind the 
syntax of instructions. Maybe there isn't one and I' m waiting to 
see something, a pattern, that is not there? So, in any case, I would 
like to be part of the "school" experiment you are planning, if possible. 
This is a good opportunity for me. And maybe I could supply some 
of my pedagogical experience in this project at some time in the 
future.

rebol's basic concept is - [    ] a block .... that is the only one 
significat element :-)

it is a series .... [this is what?] - now how can you tell what is 
inside? is it code? or literal data? try to execute it with "do" 
- if it fails, it was not code :-)

And thanks for the ideas you have given me. I am taking note of them. 
And yes, I do have a project or two I want to write in Rebol. Maybe 
I should choose the instructions from the dictionary with the aim 
to integrate them in on of my projects.

hmm, I never thought about it, but you are probably right - I tought 
one of my friends rebol for quite some time, and he was always nervous 
a bit, when I told him - look, there is special function for that 
....

probably the fastest way to find out is to try console help system, 
it does also partial searches ... it could help novices .... >> help 
fo ..... and look what is printed .... that is how I started to see, 
if there is some named function according to what I think such a 
name could be ...

hmm, there is a Dictionary, and it is in categories, but not much 
of a categories ...

What do you mean by integrating Breeze from Rebol? btw - are Macromedia 
ppl aware of rebol at all? Or was it kind of  
re ...what?". Just curious ...."


Building a wrapper for Breeze so that it can be called.  You can 
treat Breeze like an API.
As to Rebol, yes, someone there knew of it.

I have played mostly with Core because I would like my things to 
run on my pocket pc also. I have written short little programs too, 
4 ou 5 liners, maybe 10 at the most. The thing is I still do not 
know enough to plan out a more involved application. I feel I have 
to learn a lot before knowing what is there to use for my project. 
= a lot of learning befoire getting down to writing.

And I wish there will a a view for the pocketpc one day :-)

how is that? Core Command View ... how-tos, cookbook, reference to 
outer docs - e.g. Viktor Pavls rebol-tutorial (iirc he is a teacher 
too or something like that ...)

I think of Rebol very differently than most people I assume, but 
I have created languages, so I look at them from the inside out.


To Rebol is a giant state-machine that operates on strings.  It is 
a statemachine because it "remembers" what you did to a string last.



Imagine if all you had was sets of strings: "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" 
"1234567890" "one two three four" "name: Bob phone: 123-4567 Age: 
46"


Rebol tracks these strings, and keeps some overhead information for 
them such as where the current pointer (cursor) is in them.  That 
is about it.

Now, lets create 400 variations of string commands.


We will want a way to pull just the age out of that last string. 
 We create a word called "Select"  you pass Select a word (a substring) 
such as "age", and it return the next separate substring, in this 
case "46"


So there really are not 400 commands, actually there are more like 
5, and all these other commands are variations.

There is nothing really to sign up for.  We plan to blast all these 
outlets (Web, here, etc), when we are ready to try this out.  We 
might do a small test with 10 to 20 of the old timers first just 
to see how it all works.

I don't think a good path to learning Rebol is the numerous examples 
and how-tos given. With each, you learn how to program the example 
shown, but they are of little help in helping create referents for 
the learner. One needs to grasp the overall "philosophy" of structure 
of the language at one point.

Ok, Reichart, this concept of Rebol as a giant state-machine helps. 
Only 5 basic instructions...? To identify some of these meta-functions 
would help.

Then, all the other 400 concrete functions could be related to these 
5 ou more proto-instructions. That would be one way of organising 
a learning schema for Rebol.

hmm, you said it is like lisp - so yes, it is so ... I explained 
to my friend, that everything is a series/block (strings in Reichart's 
post). And you have basic set of commands to operate on strings - 
insert, delete, change, append, remove, find, first ... tenth ....... 
and you have 'do to do the code ...

All languages are a giant state machine, as matter of fact all computing 
is. The basic op is NAND. ;-)

No JaimeVargas. I teach programming to beginners (18 year old and 
+) in Science. I teach C++. A long time ago, I was a programmer: 
Cobol, RGP, assembler on the IBM 370.

Denis, I am not sure there is a shortcut to learning the philosophy 
or way of any language. A person simply has to read and write in 
that language a lot before the way is realised. Having said that, 
Carl Sassenrath wrote a long time ago a ten-point summary of rebol, 
which, being so short, had to be more philosophical, I think. Now 
to remember where that might be...

For example:



Find | Select | Pick | First | Second | Third | Forth | Fifth | and 
Sixth are all really the same command:


If you picture a master command with lots of settings (refinements) 
and even some conditional code (if refinement set, do x).

Ok. So moslty imperative programming languages. To get the gist of 
rebol I think you need to study a bit of the functional approach.

All languages are a giant state machine, as matter of fact all computing 
is. The basic op is NAND. ;-)


True, in a Turning sort of way.  But I think Rebol is more so that 
C for example, where variables are forgotten, and functions tend 
not to have memory.

I will recommend you read the PLT book, or the CTM Book. This introduce 
a lot of the concepts present in rebol, and you can get a sense on 
how to programm with series (lists), how to use func are as natural 
as integers, and how to drive your programs around the data structures, 
and not around the memory management.

Well, I was just saying that because I think rebol has turned out 
quite wordy, and evolving fast, so it's more like a natural language. 
The core natives, actions and ops are evolving more slowly than the 
mezzanine functions, though.

The values are typed, but you don't need to declare its type. The 
type is recognized at parsing time by the literal representation 
of the value, ie: 1 is integer!, #"a" is a char!, "hello" is a string!, 
1x1 is pair!, 1.1.1.2 is tuple! (not a struct!), etc.

It would be cool to build a sort of proto-tree.  So you can see where 
in the tree a word is related.

I created a graphic language that effectively had two commands:

Draw: at an xy point and
Circle: which had center coordinates, radius, angle and divisor.

The angle and devisor allowed you to pull an interesting trick.  


So to make a square, you simply called it with a divisor of 4.  this 
would build a string (block) with 4 pairs.  If you wanted a diamond, 
set the angle to 45.
 
You then passed the string to draw.


This may seem like a weird way to do this, but it was perfect for 
a real time rending system that was interactive.  We use this in 
a draw program like Flash.

Now another concept is that you can make those symbols designate 
 any value at any time. So 1 + 1 == 2 or a: 1 a + 1 == 2

BTW, The interpreter transform the infix form into a prefix form: 
1 + 1 is really + 1 1

Anton, Josh and I are planning to visit KSU very soon, what a cooincidence...to 
teach them how to teach using Predictive CognitionTM.

Another concepts is that a symbos (kinow in rebol as a word) can 
have found different forms.

MY-WORD  is a symbol and get evualted to the value inmediately.

MY-WORD: (notice the colon) is the what is used to bind a word (kind 
of a C assignment)

Difference between symbol and variable: A symbol can be of any type 
and does not get declared. Period. Is that correct?

Reichart, you are working on defining the paradigm of the language. 
I think that is the right direction to follow to generate a faster 
learning map of Rebol.

On last form is 'MY-WORD (Notice the single quote) it is a way to 
way to 'quote' a symbol this is useful when doing DATA as CODE. Another 
major concept in rebol.

If that value is a "hot" one (like a function!) then the get-word 
syntax  (:word)  will prevent the evaluation whilst still allowing 
you to get the value.

And the idea of a graph giving the family tree of the language is 
terrific.

Yes Jaime, what you are explaining is indeed a fundamental concept 
in Rebol. And one that has to be mastered early.

denismx regarding the books I mention even though they are not about 
rebol. They introduce a lot fo the concepts of Rebol.

Rebol is a decendant of Lisp the first functional programming language. 
So understanding this it will help you get the gist of rebol.

Yes, if we have a word set to a value like this:
	word: 123
then there is a series of possible "reductions" possible:
	'word  ->  word  ->  123

Likewise for a function:
	word: func [][print "hello"]
The reductions:

 'word  ->  :word (gives unevaluated function)  ->  word (evaluates 
 the function to print "hello")

>> source send   ;you can get the source code of a function by using 
the source command.  Documentation is built-in.

One very small but interesting thing about Rebol that makes it different 
than almost 20 languages I can think of………..that is that it helps 
to learn Rebol like you would a spoken language in sentences, not 
words.

An alternative is to learn denotational semantics, or lambda calculi, 
but this is only useful to CS major trying to proof properties of 
a language, it doesn't help build the intuitions of the language. 
But I will not discourage to go that route if you please.

Because C is a good abstraction of current hardware architectues. 
(It is a just bit better than assembly).

I'm addicted to Rebol since a few years back in fact. But never got 
to the point of the newcomer stage in the learning process. One excuse: 
to many distractions elswhere.

If I had time I will translate the examples there to Rebol. Maybe 
you can do that while you learn. I can help you. My first attemp 
was to make the Class Factory from the book. I got it. However Oz 
the language of the book has bit better security than Rebol. But 
any how I was able to do this and in the process I learn a lot of 
good programming techniques.

have a good dinner!

yes, I always see html as a "presentation" layer .... one of them 
...

When Rebol.plugin works on all browsers, that would become a reality.

On Rebol plugin.


Opera 9 (still in beta) have a nice way of implementing their version 
of widgets.


Technically, it is no breakthrough. But, the way they place the 'Opera 
Widgets' is similar Mac's dashboard.

The 'Opera Widget' tab' will sit on top of your desktop so long as 
Opera is loaded.


So, even if you have FF open, etc, there will still be this litte 
tab on your 'title bar'. Clicking it will show the various widgets 
you have.


I would think if Rebol could be integrated with the browser in this 
way...it will be a plus point.


Opera test builds can be obtained at http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/