AltME groups: search

Nice, WITH would have been my other choice :-)

LLVM is a good choice if you really want a VM (Red/System is more 
a standalone language than a VM).

sqlab, it would make sense to have the user choose the underlying 
model if you are doing Red on bare metal and implementing everything 
yourself, or running on a system with no Unicode support at all. 
If you are running a Red program on an existing system with Unicode 
support, the choice of which model is best has already been made 
for you. In those cases choosing the best underlying model would 
best be made by the Red porter, not the end developer.

So far, my short-list of encodings to support are UTF-8 and UTF-16LE. 
UTF-32 might be needed at some point in the future, but for now, 
I'm not aware of any system that uses it?


The Unicode standard by itself is not the problem (having just one 
encoding would have helped, though). The issue lies in different 
OSes supporting different encodings, so it makes the choice for an 
internal x-platform encoding hard. It's a matter of Red internal 
trade-offs, so I need to study the possible internal resources usage 
for each one and decide which one is the more appropriate. So far, 
I was inclined to support both UTF-8 and UTF-16LE fully, but I'm 
not sure yet that's the best choice. To avoid surprizing users with 
inconsistent string operation performances, I thought to give users 
explicit control over string format, if they need such control (by 
default, Red would handle all automatically internally). For example, 
on Windows::

    s: "hello"		;-- UTF-8 literal string

    print s		;-- string converted to UCS2 for printing through win32 
    API
    write %file s	;-- string converted back to UTF-8

    set-modes s 'encoding 'UTF-16 ;-- user deciding on format
or
    s/encoding: 'UTF-16

    print length? s	;-- Length? then runs in O(1), no surprize.



Supporting ANSI as internal encoding seems useless, being able to 
just export/import it should suffice.

BTW, Brian, IIRC, OS X relies on UTF-8 internally not UTF-16.

Janko: it can be a good or bad motivation for newcomers. Some might 
find it great to have the choice, other might be afraid by the fragmentation.

Because rebol/red are so different than anything else it might at 
the end help people learn about this coding mindset / convention, 
and then they have more choices. Sometimes lang choice is highly 
determined by runtime also (by my own exp).. in this case having 
many runtime options (red red/system rebol topaz) is a good thing.

I agree with you about the runtime choice. I wish Gabriele had more 
time to work on Topaz.

Daniel: welcome! The best choice so far would be SQLite for such 
usage. We might reuse lower level parts of SQLite to build our own 
storage system specifically designed for Red.

Ah, see, you're mixing up files. The common.reds file in Red has 
nothing to do with my bindings. It also has nothing to do with Windows. 
You should leave that alone and put my bindings in the subdirectories 
I mentioned in a parent directory of your choice

Strange concept

 It looks pretty classic to me, but there are some specific reasons 
 behind such choice, that I will detail them in a future blog entry. 
 Basically, it simplifies the tracking of Red values on stack (making 
 the work of the GC easier) and stack serialization becomes almost 
 trivial (to memory, for continuation support, or to file, for image 
 support). I think that R3 doesn't do it that way, but probably uses 
 recursion, passing all R3 values on C stack instead. It's a faster 
 approach but less flexible.

It was a bit painful commit anyway, as the internal API is not yet 
fully stabilized and to do it right, I would need to fully define 
the public runtime API first, but that would delay the 0.3.0 way 
too much, so we'll deal with that later.


What I mean by "public runtime API", is the Red API exposed to Red/System 
and to other host languages loading Red as a library. I'm still uncertain 
if such public API can be just some internal exposed or will need 
a thin layer of wrappers to make it handier (and in some cases, safer) 
to use. 


The R3 extension isolation model is too strong for my taste and makes 
the extensions harder to write than they should. I'm also uncertain 
if this model was stricly motivated by providing the safest possible 
interface with the core or, if the willing to keep the core internals 
as secret as possible was also playing a big part in this model choice.


Once the `dyn-lib-emitter` branch merged, I plan to study the Lua 
(and others) public API, to see if and how we can do better for Red. 
I already have a rough idea of how it should look like, I just need 
to refine it.

One-based is human friendly, while zero-based is usually more machine 
friendly, so I think REBOL made the right choice

As for R3, it did not really introduce "0-based convention implicitly", 
it still is firmly "1-based" in as far as the first element in a 
series can be accessed using index 1.


When you want indices-as-ordinals, you really need to decide: (a) 
is the ordinal "zeroth" meaningful, and if so, what it means; (b) 
are negative indices meaningful, and if so, what they mean.


R3 went with the choices of (a) having meaningful zeroth, defined 
as "the item in a series before the first item", and (b) allowing 
negative indices, having index -1 as the immediate predecessor of 
index 0.


R2 went with the choice of (a) not having a meaningful zeroth, but 
instead of erroring out, functions (pick) & syntax (paths) accepting 
indices are lenient: passing an index of 0 always returns NONE. For 
(b), R2 allows negative indices and defines -1 as the immediate predecessor 
of 1.

I think for future Red users, R2's model is actually the worst choice.

Petr, I haven't decided yet how events will be presented to user, 
there are different possible options and the choice will depend on 
the implementation constraints. Once we have the I/O + tasking implemented, 
we'll see what interface is the best for exposing events to user.

Pekr: you have a wrong view on what the Red ecosystem is and will 
be. It is probably caused by 15 years of limited options from RT 
and closed-source nature of REBOL products.


In Red ecosystem, like in any most other languages ecosystems, you'll 
be able to choose GUI between different options. Don't give a wrong 
picture of Red by assuming that you will be limited to only one choice.

Well, it is not the same thing. APPEND on object is blurring the 
semantic lines between an object and a block, that is not a good 
thing IMHO. It makes the choice more confusing between them for newbies 
(or maybe even some more experienced REBOL coders) while the distinction 
should be clear.

OK, I just hope that some Chinese investor isn't going to request 
you to close source Red in order to become their national selected 
language of choice :-)

BREAK in CASE/SWITCH statement is IMHO a very bad design choice leading 
to countless bugs. I'm glad Red and REBOL are doing it the right 
way.

And my "remerciements" have to go to every direct and indirect contributor 
too (Carl S, KaJ, Peter, Andreas, Ladislav, BrianH, Nick, Maxim, 
Pekr,  Jerry, many guys of the French and other international communities 
too ... name them - there's too much to name all of them without 
leaving someone behind). My best wishes to you all Gang- you're forming 
an exceptionally tight and prosperous team. Your tools are the best 
I saw for being productive and easyness of use. Let's the Red/Red-System 
combination, to be the future C language replacement as the new World's 
low/high level language mix of choice.  Not to be without mentioning 
the REBOL and its loyal followers too (many of the same Red contributors 
but many more like Robert, Cyphre, Henrik ... and many others which 
have found their way while we were waiting for R3 to become open 
source, like Gabriele, Geomol ... - without which we would never 
be here now.

(The sz sign i a bad choice as is the ¤ or the & ^ * @ and Euro sign 
together with all backets and braces.)

Red/System is in beta stage. Whether or not it is a good choice for 
a GUI app is matter of personal taste. I personally gave up building 
GUI apps in a C-level language a long time ago. However, if you want 
to give it a try, I recommend you Kaj's GTK+ binding, which now works 
fine on Linux ARM, as shown here: 

http://static.red-lang.org/rpi-gtk-widgets.png

You can see the source code for this GTK+ demo here:

http://red.esperconsultancy.nl/Red-GTK/artifact/3453dd410a1c64ca8f842f75c7431b6f7fc3c4b3


As you can see, Red/System has some limited dialecting capabilities 
that Kaj leveraged to build a very nice GUI dialect (which is quite 
an achievement for a low-level language).

As there are frequently used, native is probably a better choice.

There is no makedoc files, I'm using the Blogger platform (Google). 
Unfortunately, a bad choice, it is an awful blogging platform, the 
only part that doesn't suck is the Google Analytics integration.

I would wait with the new site until it is possible and realistic 
to do it using Red.
long ago

 I explored a bit into themes for blogger that would give a better 
 fit for Red, but in the end the one chosen by Nenad turned out to 
 be far from the worst choice. (There were nice blue and green themes 
 but 'red' kind of limits the possibiities in that sense) The generated 
 CSS is like any generated webfile: big and bloated. I had no lust 
 in reducing it, spending a lot of time on it.

I think there is value in Red/System outside of Red. Think of the 
primary examples people might use it for, where C might be the first 
choice, and provide examples of what they look like in Red/System. 
I know CGIs are mostly done in high level langs now, but I would 
certainly include one as an example. Implement some performance intensive 
algorithms to show what RedS looks like, compare to C. Or apps that 
need to be small and fast. e.g. a 0MQ broker.

Copyleft, even the minimal copyleft of LGPL, is a bit off-putting 
for a development tool of a Rebol-like semantic model. For reasons 
that only became apparent later, so I'm not knocking the choice in 
hindsight because of the results.

Sounds like a poor design choice on the part of the DirectSound team.

I'm fairly sure this will all go away if I enable cookies, but I 
don't want to let all those sites install cookies, without choice 
and without telling at that

Trello is a very good choice, so anyone can see what is on the list 
easily. I use it for my work and personal lists. There is Android 
app too.

Bad idea

 is not an argument. You should look at it with a fresh view, if we 
 got used to it after several years, it doesn't mean that it was a 
 good design choice in the first place.

Now is the time to discuss this, but it sounds like Doc has thought 
this through, and made his choice for clear reasons. If he's set 
on it, then we should look at what, if anything, needs to be done, 
to make Bolek, Endo, and others happy.

linked
 is a bad choice there, "encoded" will be more accurate.

About odd, this solution managed to get all odd number from the even 
ones. Your solution is way more elegant, better fitting the language.

Base-1 Base-0, my personal view on this, it is the programmers choice 
on the level of the source code. What happens beneath the surface 
is compiler/linker sh*t. As a programmer and a human being I start 
to count at 1. 0 is not the new number 1 nor is 1 the new number 
2 etc. It is only an addressing issue, compare to the post. Houses 
in the street are numbered from 1 up to N. The first address a computer 
has in an array is the all 0 address, which is the first "pidgeon-hole" 
to be used. The computer doesn't know 0 as we understand it. Well 
you know all about it.

Still prefer to make the choice as a programmer. How it is done behind 
the curtains is up to the compiler. Compare this with the address 
used in memory. Changing your array from 0-based to 1-based, it ends 
up in the same memory address (say that is the only change you made 
in the source). 

Besides using the 0-based structure was perhaps a struggle for the 
original programmer!!

I am with Kaj on this. Supplying the download link when you update 
some project is not meaningful. If the corresponding link to the 
fossil rep is posted you can take a quick look at the  projectfiles 
and then decide if it is worth the troul]ble for you to update your 
own repo's with the dl script.

Besides that, the Github is not a nice solution imho just chosen 
because of free, and widely used (for exposure purposes) not for 
real ease iyam (if you ask me). So better appreciate the huge work 
Kaj has pulled of to make Red much more widely useable and accept 
his choice.

May be that the character sets offerd for selection under the properties 
tab of the Win console don't offer this display choice but I don't 
know how to install others. Currently I only have True Type Lucida 
Console, True type Consolas and Raster... : (

myresult was: 1
 myresult is : 0.5
 myresult is : 1
It did also on the first printed line. Could be a design choice.

Carl, 9-Sep-2012 15:46:54: "I need to apologize all of you for the 
lack of response to your comments. This was due to a funny incident 
that happened on my ranch.


Last week, a few heffalumps burst into my basement and turned over 
the last barrel of 1999 Châtemateloo. Unfortunately, the precious 
liquid flooded telecommunication cables and I lost network connection.

You know me, this is not a reason to give up.


Using a microwave oven, amateur radio, and 4 lines of code in REBOL 
I was able to construct a modem and here I am.


Well, I read very carefully your comments (the first two lines of 
each comment) and I noticed that most of them contain the phrase 
"Hi Carl". I was hoping that I'll find out from them what further 
steps should be taken to save the future of REBOL, but it seems that 
as usual I have to come up with a solution myself.

So, here it is.

I decided to open source REBOL.


Choice of license is very difficult because there are many kinds 
of them. I examined the majority of them, and none meets my needs. 
They are overloaded and too complicated. The only thing I can do 
in this situation is to write my own license. I name it ... Rebolense.

Creating a license is not an easy task, but is necessary.

I'll be working on it soon, so stay tuned. "

What a bad choice of color for your name - I just can't read it ... 
is it from Aries ?

...and I am quite comfortable with it, since the freedom to use the 
GPL'd code to any data of my choice is one of the freedoms given 
to me by the GPL.

It's much worse. ORCA had the choice of LGPL and GPL, Boron is just 
LGPL

Arnold,  what do you mean by foreach forall ?

Arnold, Forall is the worst choice, especially inside another loop.
Just look at the code of forall.by yourself.

Skipping is not rejecting, and Rebol doesn't require special handling 
of NUL in a string. DEHEX made the wrong choice.

PeterWood, caelum and Endo: Thanks for the ideas.  I've seen Olivier's 
book, but I don't have a copy myself.  That might be a good choice.

I don't think I had the choice

That's not much of an answer, Scot. I was hoping that someone who 
is familiar with these markups can say something specific to help 
me decide if I'll ever have to make the choice. I could go through 
each and compare the features side by side, but maybe someone has 
already done that (haven't found any comparisons).

And my "remerciements" have to go to every direct and indirect contributor 
too (Carl S, KaJ, Peter, Andreas, Ladislav, BrianH, Nick, Maxim, 
Pekr,  Jerry, many guys of the French and other international communities 
too ... name them - there's too much to name all of them without 
leaving someone behind). My best wishes to you all Gang- you're forming 
an exceptionally tight and prosperous team. Your tools are the best 
I saw for being productive and easyness of use. Let's the Red/Red-System 
combination, to be the future C language replacement as the new World's 
low/high level language mix of choice.  Not to be without mentioning 
the REBOL and its loyal followers too (many of the same Red contributors 
but many more like Robert, Cyphre, Henrik ... and many others which 
have found their way while we were waiting for R3 to become open 
source, like Gabriele, Geomol ... - without which we would never 
be here now.

Well, yes, REPEAT would be the clear choice, but if you have a range! 
and passed its lower and upper bounds to FOR, what would you expect? 
FWIW, I've always thought 'bump should have been a refinement option 
in FOR.

Whatever we choose with FOR, we should make REPEAT behave similarly 
in that same choice. Those two are in the same family.

I was very specific about that in the initial choice of models. Any 
model which allowed any value of bump to result in an infinite loop 
needs to be excluded from out choices.

The existing LOOP is used quite often, so any replacement for it 
won't go in R3 by default. However, the main reason LOOP is used 
is because it doesn't have the overhead that a lot of the other loops 
have, less than the other natives even. Its simplicity and definite 
form are its strengths - a loop with a more flexible form would be 
need to process that flexibility at runtime, which would add inefficiency 
that could easily be avoided by making that choice at development 
time by choosing the loop that meets your needs. And any loop construct 
that requires any kind of manual reducing of its arguments in order 
to have it take the result of an expression is a definite no-go. 
I just got rid of that in REWORD.


I like http://issue.cc/r3/884as a replacement for FOR. It keeps 
the local binding (unlike Marco's CFOR above, sorry) and is flexible 
in behavior without being flexible in form (it has a very simple 
implementation).

Don't blame me - it wasn't my choice :-)
I just helped with suggesting some alternatives.

Isn't that kind of inconsistant ? You have a choice of 0 or 2+.  
How do you get just 1 leading space ?
Furthermore:

even an error may be more natural than the observed behaviour, but 
if the operation is valid, then there is no other choice

and if such an expression isn't illegal, then there is not much choice 
left

Howver, the time taken to search for a bzip2 decompressor, download 
and install, and then decompress was longer than the time it would 
have taken to download the extra 10Mb.  Maybe offer people  the choice 
of what archive they want.

Ok, I need some advice from you Linux gurus out there: I'm running 
my xpeers server on an old RH 7.3 installation with EXT3 filesystem. 
The server is running in a data-center, so only remote access via 
SSH.


1. Does it make sense to update the kernel / system? If, how can 
I do this remote?

2. I think with xpeers ReiserFS might be a better choice because 
I have thousands of small files on my system, that needs to be handled. 
How can I update the filesystem?

people who startout using Ubuntu, Fedora or Redhat find themselfs 
In an Linux world that not even default with i.e. Disk-Structures 
on Tru64 or Solaris or HPUX.. while using other Linux distributions 
from around 1995 they stick with the UNIX system (IV|V) layout..But 
when it comes to development I can emagine to make a choice between 
"package handling" and "environment handling"... Then I would stick 
with debian..just has a better package manager...where slackware 
is a little more the "do it yourself package manager.." still 'tar 
does wonderful things.. for the user...

Anyway, I will delegate this task now to someone here, and start 
taking the box apart. My last choice. Always.

some guy tested Linux distros on old machine ...
http://www.linux.com/print.pl?sid=06/02/13/1854251

the choice of WM will be the key factor, I think.

my linux troubles (this is longer)


I'm pretty frustrated at this moment, maybe somebody can help me...


I'm linux newbie, I'm using it for 6 months or so. I've installed 
Ubuntu for my girlfriend and it works OK. So I decided to install 
linux for me too. I've got Athlon X64 computer, so I tried 64bit 
version of Ubuntu. But you cannot run 32bit programs under 64bit 
Linux, so no REBOL or AltMe. OK, I can live with 32bit linux, no 
problem. So I installed MEPIS. It's not bad, it has got media support 
but...it's KDE.


I never knew anything about KDE vs. Gnome vs. whatever wars, I just 
don't care, but day after day I found KDE to be bloated, slow and 
buggy. Compared to elegance of Ubuntu on my girfriend's computer 
I decided that I just don't like KDE, I don't like all that menus 
where I'm always lost, long loading times, that awful blue theme, 
childish icons and everything K-labeled. Every window and every button 
on KDE looks so BIG compared to windows GUI, it's just a waste of 
screens's space. So I tried different window managers and found Xfce, 
icebox and some other small and fast window managers. But running 
MEPIS with different window manager than KDE was not optimal so I 
decided to remove MEPIS and install xubuntu. Everything was OK and 
I had xubuntu instaled.


One day later I managed to exchange my gfx card. I was using Matrox 
Millenium 2MB PCI card and exchanged it for 3D labs Banshee 16MB 
PCI card (I know that both cards are somehow underpowered for my 
computer but that's OK, I don't play any 3d games, so I don't need 
some new card). I've booted into Windows and everything was OK. I 
can even select resolution better than 1024x768 (because that's not 
optimal resolution for 21" monitor :-) So I restarted and booted 
into xubuntu. x-server didn't start. 


As I said, I'm linux newbie so I don't want to mess with some config 
files so I said to myself OK, I reinstall it, it's just one day old 
installation, no problem. I've booted the live-cd, grub let me choose 
resolution of 1280x1024, I booted xubuntu and - it was running in 
640x480. Yes, I had the choice to change resolution - but only to 
320x240. I tried ubuntu (gnome) and it was the same. ubuntu's x-server 
probably does not support my banshee gfx card. I tried MEPIS also 
and - it worked! I can boot mepis 3.3.1 live cd in 1024x768 (but 
not more - with windows, I can go up to 1920x1440). But when I boot 
mepis, I do see that KDE desktop thing and it makes me feel sick 
(hell, even windows seem to be more fun to use than KDE for me!).


So, what now? I cannot use windows only (1. i don't like it :) 2. 
it's got problems of its own - it cannot download files bigger than 
cca 1MB without error. Probably some driver problem but I still haven't 
found a sollution. this is not problem on linux) and I don't like 
KDE. I know that there's one sollution - to buy relatively new pci-x 
n-vidia gfx card and problems may be gone. but that's not what I 
want to do. That 3dfx banshee is good enough for me, I just want 
some fast and small OS running on it.


Maybe I'm just missing a computer that can boot in 15 seconds into 
full GUI enviroment (yes, my old Amiga :)

Obviously, Ubuntu has popular momentum, but if you want to stick 
with a Red Hat based distibution, CentOS is a good choice -- http://www.centos.org/.
According to DistroWatch, "CentOS is 100% compatible rebuild of the 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in full compliance with Red Hat's redistribution 
requirements. CentOS is for people who need an enterprise class operating 
system stability without the cost of certification and support."

Ah, good choice :-)

Opera is my browser of choice on all platforms. I never used it for 
mail, though.Thanks for reminding me.

Regarding EC2: yes, you have to do persistent storage outside of 
EC2. The logical choice for that is Amazon S3. You can install an 
S3 driver for the FUSE filesystem on Linux and use it transparently, 
if you keep the performance characteristics in mind

Most distros are just to big, or contain that many things I don't 
need. Maybe Debian is the best choice. Starting with a total bare 
minimum.

Ok, I'll try to hack the http-tools.r, see if I can get anything 
done. I saw a script written in python claiming to do multipart uploads, 
but I hope I can get it working in Rebol, which for me is always 
first choice.

I'm looking to dropdown and I can't see in the popup list the choice 
entries you supply in the data field...

G4C TUT_MCListview

// ===========================================================
// A Multi Column (or Database) Listview..
// ===========================================================

WINDOW 126 90 367 373 "Listview"
	winattr style resize

xOnLoad
	// add some records to the listview & open..
	gosub #this AddRecords
	guiopen #this

xOnClose
	guiquit #this

// ===========================================================
// The listview
// - This is a normal MULTISELECT listview (the default).
// For this type to be triggered, you must double-click it.
// ===========================================================

XLISTVIEW 0 0 0 0 'The Title' "" var

	attr ID mylv
	attr resize 0022
	attr frame sunk

	// Give it a grid and allow the user to drag, drop & re-arrange
	// the lines - You can add more styles here..
	attr style grid/arrange/drag/drop/arrange

	// Add some columns. The first one we state with a '#'
	// in front to indicate we mean the 1st column.
	attr LVCOLUMN '#Item/width/120/TITLE/Description'

 attr LVCOLUMN 'Units/width/60/TITLE/Units/TYPE/number/JUSTIFY/RIGHT'

 attr LVCOLUMN 'Amount/width/60/TITLE/Amount/TYPE/number/JUSTIFY/RIGHT'

 attr LVCOLUMN 'Total/width/60/TITLE/Total/TYPE/number/JUSTIFY/RIGHT'

	// show the line double clicked..

 SetWinTitle #this 'SUM: $%Units x $%Amount = $($%Units * $%Amount)'


// ===========================================================
// This is a routine to add 100 records with various
// meaningless values to the above listview. Note how
// the fields can be used as normal variables.
// ===========================================================

xRoutine AddRecords
	local c

	use lv #this mylv

	// before we start, we HIDE the listview. This will
	// stop Gui4Cli from visually refreshing it every time
	// we add a record and will GREATLY increase the speed.
	// This will have no effect if the window is closed.
	// After we finish, we show it again..
	setevent #this mylv HIDE

	for c 0 100
		// add an empty record..
		lv add ''

		// Fill the fields with various values..
		%Item   = "This is Item $c"
		%Units  = $($c * 3)
		%Amount = $(($%Units / 2)*1000)
		%Total  = $($%Units * $%Amount)

	endfor

	// Show the listview again, refreshing the display..
	setevent #this mylv SHOW

// ===========================================================
// Right mouse button handling - Some menu choices..
// ===========================================================

xOnRMB


 QuickMenu -1 -1 'Select All/Remove selected/Add 100 records/#sepa/cancel'
	use lv #this mylv
	docase $$choice
		case = 0			// Select All
			lv select all
			break
		case = 1			// Remove selected
			lv delete selected
			break
		case = 2			// Add some records..
			gosub #this AddRecords
	endcase

About the choice of the right internal data-keeping structure: because 
we are manipulating big XML files (> 2MB), we had to find the most 
performant way to retrieve our data into a nested structure. The 
choice was block! / hash! / list! / or object! . after a few tests, 
it appears that block! is the most suitable in terms of retrieval 
time. Note that this is true only for nested structures. In case 
of one-level structures, the hash! is the most performant (see http://www.rebol.net/article/0020.html).

(pick your choice :)

REBOL's built in BUILD-MARKUP function can also be a good choice.

The the laptop I have been eyeing:


http://www.xtremenotebooks.com/index.php?section=specs&model_id=1054


But it is too expensive for me. Does anyone know of a similar one 
at a cheaper price?  Or perhaps someone knows that  this would not 
be a good choice anyway. I'm open for suggestions. I just need a 
big, high resolution screen, large harddrive, and lots of speed. 
I'm not particularly worried about weight.

BTW: For single apps, going with application virtualization is a 
good choice too. You can get Office packed into 4 EXE files.

Uniserve is very nice, I have been using it to prototype/test before 
I upload to actual server.  It broke my heart it was gpl.  BSD is 
very good choice.  Free software should not be restricted, and GPL 
has too many of those.    makedoc/spec is the killer app,  and in 
that intensional programming vein is coursing all the best documentation, 
and REBOL  does a fine job of documenting itself because it is so 
semantic by nature.  To understand how to use a moderately complex 
system like a full-featured web server, it is going to be important 
to capture the thinking of those who wrote the code.  REBOL parsing 
allows all information pertaining to the code to be right there with 
the code,  and a function of  DO -ing anything.  the standard documentation 
scheme should follow how REBOL [] headers work, and simply have the 
makedoc embedded within the scripts.

so you have to remaining choice (3 in fact ) 1) using IE  but then 
your not my pal any more, 2) installing Inkscape and relate it to 
svg file 3) help me finishing the SVG viewer using REBOL !!! ;))

now let's convince Carl, that as AGG was good choice for vectors, 
we should find another library for sound. Maybe fmod?

Jean-François: one of the courses I teach is an introduction to programming 
to science students. Some of which will follow two more courses in 
programming, in the same language. Over the years, I've done this 
in Fortran, Pascal and now C++. At one time the first two courses 
were given in Python and the last (which I was giving), in C++. We 
decided that it was better to give all 3 in the same language. I 
didn't think Python was a good choice.

I'm now giving the first course (and maybe all 3). I'm exploring 
the possibility of opting at some time for Rebol, if I can break 
down the language into subsets that are "easily" learned and that 
offer useful tools for some large category of problems. I did'nt 
find any tutorial that seems to be quite there yet. 

Of course, the language is not the only thing taught. Basic programming 
and computer science concepts are also taught. But these can be taught 
independently from the choice of the language, for a large part. 

Rebol is my preoccupation. Some languages need a very lot of reading/learning 
before you can start to use it for solving problems with them. Maybe 
this is the case for Rebol. But I'm not sure yet. My hypothesis is 
that nearly everyone has learned Rebol by reading the Core manual 
and looking at examples in tutorials. It's ok to do it this way if 
one chooses so. But the teacher is expected to devise smoother paths 
for the learning process.

(Thinking out loud) It occurs to me that computed branches would 
be a lot easier if you could reference the target values in your 
code, so that you have something to compute with. If the offsets 
were absolute you could just assign them to the label words (something 
that could be done in the first pass of the assembler rewrite of 
the branch statements). Relative offsets could be calculated pretty 
easily if you had something like a HERE opcode that would assign 
the current position to a variable that could be used soon afterwards 
to calculate the relative offset. For that matter, the HERE opcode 
could perform the assignment of the original label as well, and even 
be accomplished by a rewrite rule in the branch fixup pass of the 
assembler.


Here's my proposal for a HERE assembler directive. No native opcodes 
would need to be added - this would be another directive like label. 
This directive could be used to set the target values to words for 
later computation. Assuming BRAW stays relative and no absolute computed 
branch is added, it could also be used in computations to convert 
from absolute to relative offsets. This would be sufficient to make 
computed branches practical.


- A new directive HERE, taking two arguments, a word and a literal 
integer.

It would set the word to the position of the HERE directive, plus 
an offset specified in the second parameter. The offset would need 
to be a literal because the calculation would be performed ahead 
of time by the assembler - 0 would mean no offset. If you don't want 
to reset the position every time you branch to the word use an offset 
of 3. Resetting the word after every branch would allow its use as 
a temporary in absolute-to-relative calculations, but that would 
only be an advantage until the JIT or optimizer is implemented - 
the choice would be up to the developer. Having a mandatory second 
argument is necessary for reasons that will become clear later.


- The HERE directive would be rewritten away in the fix-bl function 
of the assembler like this:

REBOL []  ; So I could use SciTE to write this message

fix-bl: func [block /local labels here label] [
    labels: make block! 16
    block-action: :fix-bl
    if debug? [print "=== Fixing binding and labels... ==="]
    parse block [
        some [
            here:
            subblock-rule (here/1: bind here/1 words)
            |

            'label word! (here/1: bind here/1 words insert insert tail labels 
            here/2 index? here)
            |  ; Beginning of the added code
            'here word! integer! (

                here/1: bind 'set words  ; This is why HERE needs two arguments

                here/3: here/3 + index? here  ; Offset from position of this directive
                if (here/3 < 1) or (here/3 > 1 + length? block) [
                    error/with here "Offset out of bounds:"
                ]
            )  ; End of the added code
            |
            opcode-rule (here/1: bind here/1 words)
            |
            skip (error here)
        ]
    ]
    parse block [
        some [
            here:
            ['bra word! | 'brat word! | 'braf word!] (

                if not label: select labels here/2 [error/with here "Missing label:"]
                here/2: label - index? here
            )
            |
            opcode-rule
            |
            skip (error here)
        ]
    ]
]

The method of assigning the block position to the word with the LABEL 
directive seems like a good idea - it was my first choice, but it 
didn't handle the offset calculations needed by the absolute-to-relative 
calculations needed by a relative BRAW.

I am not the one who does the work in Excel. Accountants do. It is 
not my choice to make, and the choice can't be made at all for historical 
records. At the time they switched to Excel, yes I was the one who 
championed it, but there was no OpenOffice then, no KOffice, no REBOL, 
no Windows 95 even. I am just called in to do the things that are 
over their head and when I'm done, these things usually don't need 
to be done again. Two years from now a new set of problems wil need 
to be solved and they will likely still be using Excel.

Bear in mind that around 10% of all people do not have javascript 
enabled. That way be through choice, necessity, or following US government 
security advice.

Javascript usage stats: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Before clicking on a link to a web site that you are not familiar 
with or do not trust, take the precaution of disabling active content.
:
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST04-012.html


With PHP all the oomph is in the server , so it is under your control. 
As you cannot guarantee that JS will be available in the client if, 
extra steps are needed to ensure the website works without it -- 
even though it may work spectacularly better with it.

All those Google applications. Wouldn't it be a lot better user experience, 
if REBOL clients were made, instead of having the applications inside 
a browser? Might be a good plan:

1) Get people away from MS products. It's not the best solution having 
everything inside a browser, but it lets them know again, that they 
have a choice.

2) Now people have choices, they can choose the best solution, which 
is REBOL reblets.

See my post from 12-Feb. The answer to "noise" is substitution variables 
(as it's a form of expression more familiar to long time SQLers). 
Also, I've never liked the idea of performing an operation (be it 
'compose, 'reduce, 'copy, etc) that takes away that choice from the 
coder ... someone may use statements that *never* need to be composed 
and they shouldn't have to carry that cost just because some else 
needs it.

Depends on how much data and how much complexity you need. RebDB 
is good for under a million rows where the column data is short (i.e. 
not storing 1MB strings). SQLite is a better choice for lots/big 
rows or where you need non-trivial joins/views. I'd use RebDB for 
simple apps like a "Contacts" DB, and SQLite for anything requiring 
half a dozen or more tables.

Ok, thanks. That make the choice easier.

Ashley - ok, that is your choice, but imo strange one ... what is 
the point of having scheme access to apparently file-based database?

I think it *is* worth it, because it gives the choice to copy or 
not to the user, instead of deciding beforehand for the user.  It 
being a somewhat unexpected optimization, however, means that it 
should be documented clearly, which Ashley is doing.

It's simply about choice. By default the driver assumes you want 
to be dealing with the full range of REBOL datatypes. If all you 
need are the five datatypes that SQLite supports (Integer, Decimal, 
Binary, Text and Null) then use the /direct refinement. How is this 
"confusing" or "clumsy"? If you don't like the fact that the string! 
form differs from the block form then choose the one you are most 
comfortable with and stick with that.

Trying to produce .doc and .xls files = lots of trouble!

Thinking a little into the future, OpenDocument is probably a better 
choice: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office

Q: go, find whatever website flash plug-in part of website, press 
right mouse - you will see menu for controlling flash script itself 
... that is what I am talking about -

A: That is a choice of the developers.  The fact that people leave 
it as "default"


Q: Reichart - and you imo overestimate Flash's importance - they 
can be milti-whatever company, yet I would have to see some noticed 
real-life app someone uses in corporate sphere :-)


A: "I" over estimate Flash?  Uh, er….you mean like how Yahoo over 
estimated Flickr (front end is Flash), and bought them?  


Or, while you might not like it, if you are looking at an animated 
ad on the web, there is a good chance it is Flash.  That would be 
a 500 billion dollar industry that is using Flash as their delivery 
mechanism.  That is the app, animated content with games and click 
through.


And if you use T-Mobile, then you are using Flash.  Yup, it "is" 
the interface for their cellphone content provider.



Pekr, I'm not a fan of Flash, or Macromedia…I'm simply stating that 
Rebol should consider Flash's model as a pathway to a clean install 
and plug-in interface.

In other words, while they are about 2.5% world wide (4-7% in US), 
of personal system choice, they represent between 7% and 15% of individual 
software sales.

Wow!

I would not want to turn that market down. 

And……………my friends…………….the web is the great equalizer…

its VID based, so any current draw blocks set in the effects can 
be used.  the buttons, field, and choice use AGG for their rendering.

>> do %slim.r
'slim is defined, no choice about that.

its more like what value it adds ;-)  but the core featues are:
-loading external code, but in a managed way

-path resolution, allows you to put libs in one or many folders, 
a part from code and reuse.
-version verification.

-enforcing of a standard, where all the code is wrapped in one context 
and the use of 'set is illegal (nothing gets bound to global context)

-allowing the user of a lib the choice of exposing what words he 
wants in his code.

I sue similar tricks as a teacher, maybe you made the right choice

Oldes: View can be a good choice for server is you need server-side 
dynamic image generation or manipulation. The drawback is for Unix 
servers, they'll require X libs to be installed.

Carl and I are staying at the Hotel Excelsior on rue Cujas.  It has 
good prices, large rooms, internet access, and a patio.  An other 
good choice for the area is Hotel Desmines.

hmm, maybe think links. thereis no real map, only relations. when 
someone browses, the page is picked by chance too, not only choice. 
when something good happens and you have high statistics, you may 
 get it.