AltME groups: search

People have mentioned that we're the guest of RT here. Although Carl 
is fairly OK with clone development now, we're still a competitor, 
so a separate world may be the polite thing to do. At least I'm not 
sure it would be appreciated to make this group web public

Mmm... what to do ?

I use, but I do not link to them probably? If GPL means I have to 
release ALL my app code, even the code COMPLETLY irrelevant to the 
GPL stuff I linked too, then it sucks big way. I don't hesitate to 
release any improvements/changes produced by developer to the GPL 
part in question, but not the whole app.

I'd prefer not to do double work. Besides, there not general instructions, 
but alternate instructions for compiling with my Builder tool. Not 
generic enough for the wiki, I think, unless they would prove very 
popular

What diffs? I have to make changes first. :-) When I do, I'll try 
to do it in the Subversion repository, if that's OK with you

I' ve been trying to do the very same thing defending REBOL in all 
those years, for example in the Syllable project. It's very hard

Syllable is an open source project and was always clearly presented 
as such. We do that for one overriding reason only: to never get 
in the Atari/Amiga/RiscOS/BeOS situation again, where commercial 
entities destroy your platform

Of course, ORCA has been able to read and write files for years, 
and that's what I use in Syllable. And when it can do that, or just 
print to standard output, you can also do CGI with it

Has anyone a project file for Codeblocks and Boron under Windows 
or some hints how to do it?

i think all you should need to do for that on windows is fire up 
cmake gui and select the boron directory

Kaj, thanks for noting that standard input example - it is new.  
In June, Boron's user manual version was 0.1.2 and the windows release 
was 0.1.4.  It's really encouraging to see work accomplished :)  
I donated a small amount back in June to Karl using the paypal link 
- if he's motivated by money to do more work, I'd support that without 
reservation.  I don't have much time right now to explore much, but 
I'd love to see a continuing active open source alternative.

yes... I'm not sure how to do it, though.

How do you start R3 on OS X? Isn't there an app setting where you 
must tell OS X to start a command line program in a terminal?

Anyway, I don't have OS X, so the best thing to do is to take this 
up with Karl on the Boron mailing list

If you want to run the demo, you can now do so

sorry, I have other things to do right now.

As the only comparable projects to boron seem to be REBOL and World 
(both of which are closed source),, I can't see the "not being able 
to look at the source" issue being a problem. I don't think that 
boron's licensing has anything to do with its level of popularity.

And please stop talking about GPL in this context. It has nothing 
to do with Boron

I suppose you could link statically, but you don't want that if you 
don't want to be LGPL compatible. Although you could do it if you 
distribute your object files for relinking

Hi, I am interested into building an maintaining documentation for 
those programming languages based on REBOL.
It would be nice to have a DOCBASE for them.
What I search is:
- Someone ABLE to SETUP the Linux and the Wiki Software
- Someone which would share with me the cost of hosting.
Do you like the idea ?
Write me at [giuseppe-:-chillemi-:-eu]

I should be able to do that, looks easy enough. I'll call you if 
I get stuck. :-)

GrahamC, thank you for passing this around.  I did get part way to 
a solution, as noted on your site.  Strange as it may seem, I am 
able to get to the network drives if I run a copy of REBOL that I 
download and leave with the name it came with, namely rebol-view-278-3-1. 
 The copy of REBOL that was giving me trouble was the same rebol-view-278-3-1, 
but I had renamed it to rebview to make a desktop shortcut work. 
 I had the name "rebview" in the shortcut so that I would not have 
to change the shortcut if I ever got an upgraded version of REBOL 
with a different name, like maybe rebol-view-279.  So my first problem 
with WIndows 7, REBOL, and network drives seems fixed.  


I still am not to a full solution to my Windows 7 issues.  I have 
some REBOL scripts that use the "call" command to run powershell. 
 Powershell then runs a powershell script to extract stuff from an 
EXCEL spreadsheet, which then is manipulated by the REBOL script. 
 Actually it's a bit messier.  I run a REBOL program launcher on 
the C drive which runs a REBOL script on a network drive.  The script 
on the network drive calls powershell with parameters to make powershell 
run a powershell script.  The powershell script extracts EXCEL data, 
and the calling REBOL script then makes a report of the extracted 
data.  


When I try to do this, the result from powershell is that I am not 
allowed to run scripts on that computer.  I am aware of this feature 
of powershell, and I have done what has worked for Windows XP (set-executionpolicy 
remotesigned).  I can run powershell directly, and execute scripts 
located on a network drive.  When a REBOL script that worked on XP 
calls powershell on WIndows 7, it won't go.  I am not expecting any 
help with this last issue at this time because the "call" does work 
in some cases (call/shell "notepad") (call/console/show "powershell"), 
so I still have several things to try, and if none work I am plotting 
a work-around.

I just tried:

do to-rebol-file "L:\some\path\here\test.r"


and everything went OK, Win Vista here. Console is being launched 
form the shortcut on start bar, pointing to renamed to rebol.exe

I've got a function that doesn't and I know one of you can explain 
why. 
foo: func [  /dothis anobject ] [
 if dothis [
  dosomething anobject
 ]
]

foo myobject


So the dosomething function does not work with the "anobject".  However, 
If I hardcode the "myobject" into foo like:
foo: func [ /dothis ]
[
 if dothis [ 
 dosomething myobject
 ]
] 


It works. So my questions are: Is it because "anobject" is a pointer? 
And what do I do on the calling/receiving sides to fix that?
Thanks in advance.

OK, figured it out. I had to pass the object as a 'word then "do" 
it in the function to get it to work.

Gregg, thanks, it could be the func that's getting the arg, the "dosomething" 
in my example. I hadn't look at that though I was wondering still 
what the difference was with the two objects. Unfortunately it always 
seemed right even with the types defined because they were both objects. 
At least that's what type? outputted. Maybe it has something to do 
with the context they were bound to. Anyway, that's for another day. 
Thank you as always.

That's incredible Maxim. Good work. With what you do with parse, 
is the knowledge available online  in tthe form of the present parse 
documentation, or did you have to discover new techniques? I have 
to admit I just barely use it when I need to. Anyway, thanks for 
sharing your experience. I

learning parse requires baby steps and at some point, the decision 
to solve a real problem with it and force yourself to learn it.  
I didn't use parse for almost a decade until I started using it more 
and more to a point that currently I do more parse than any other 
coding in REBOL (but that's just because its idealy suited for this).


some little tricks accumulate with experience and eventually, we 
discover pretty wacky things, which allow us to use parse almost 
like a VM.

REBOL parse is a gem, a treasure to follow. Me, the coding lamer, 
did few things using it. Guys coding C++ first came meh, well, interpreter. 
Then  - how is it possible it is faster than C++ app? Later on, they 
came with new requests asking - well, you know, you have that parser, 
we need to do following stuff ...

Guys, with all this said (and I agree), perhaps this is the one things 
that needs to be the focal point for Rebol and eventually the #Not 
Rebol languages.  I know there are some tutorials out there but do 
any of them do justice to parse? I keep going back to the Codeconscious 
one: http://www.codeconscious.com/rebol/parse-tutorial.htmland 
the ones at reboltutorial, but there doesn't seem to be a lot considering 
how much one can do with it.

I don't know how it's on Vista, but on W7 or XP you can place it 
anywhere... I today updated my old zlib script to do late initialisation, 
you can find it here: https://github.com/Oldes/rs/tree/88291b8c720e9026978a080ca40100c3f2fb780f/projects-dll/zlib/latest

Maybe do somehing like:

>> keys: make hash! ["a" "b"]
== make hash! ["a" "b"]
>> values: ["b" "c"]
== ["b" "c"]
>> pick values index? find keys "a"
== "b"
>> pick values index? find keys "b"
== "c"

The
	pick values index? find keys
could be put in a nice function to call.

I don't care, if my C compiler is closed source or not, because it 
just works. I also shouldn't care, if my COBOL compiler and interpreter 
is closed source or not, but I actually do, because the company behind 
can't figure out to make graphical tables (called GRIDs) the correct 
way, so my COBOL programs doesn't work as intended, and I have to 
create work-arounds. Years ago, I didn't care, if REBOL was closed 
source or open, but later I did, because I couldn't finish projects, 
I made with it.


Any future language, I would use, I don't care if it's closed or 
open, if it delivers, what it promices. If it doesn't, it's another 
case.

The problem is that what you think is the correct way to do things 
may be not

Geomol, I already know that you made some technical choices in World 
that I would not have done because I think (maybe I'm wrong) I know 
better ways to do faster VM.

So, to my mind,you already failed in the task to deliver a promising 
clone.

Just to say that your 'needs' , expectations and technical skills 
are probably not the best in each room.
;-)

I mean, even Carl failed in that matter. Everyone do shitty design 
choices occasionally. It's why it's better to have friendly eyes 
behind our shoulder.

World should accept REBOL [] as header to run R2, R3 scripts through 
it without editing these.

For now, it's possible to run REBOL scripts with this function:
do-rebol: func [file][do skip load file 2]

That's why you don't need to write the REBOL header at the command 
line, even though those commands are just passed to DO like any other 
script :)

You can also do it the other way round, then it won't lead to an 
error (at the moment, that is :)

Correct. World is not designed to cope with such cases, where words 
changes from functions taking arguments to passive non-function values, 
or if number of arguments changes to a function. To change the behaviour 
of the c block, a compile is needed. So question is, if that compile 
should be executed by a COMPILE call, or if the compile state of 
the block could be reset, and in this case, it would be compiled, 
the next time, it was executed with DO.

I don't think you should keep the compiled block in memory when DO 
is used.

Compiled blocks (including the nested ones) should be linked with 
functions only (whe functions are created).

I don't think it would be a real perf problem  because DO is not 
used that much to execute standard code in an app.
Just my opinion though.

Regarding AS, the REBOL AS-BINARY and AS-STRING can be achieved with:

as binary! ...
as string! ...

But it's also possible to do:

w> as issue! "abc"
== #abc
w> as paren! [a b c]
== (a b c)
w> as tag! "title"
== <title>

and many other combinations.

its tempting to be able to do:  

i: to integer! my-handle
i : i + 1
some-routine i


but its very bad practice (from within a scripting language) IMHO 
since it allows all manner of crashes to occur, not to speak of security 
issues this can open up as well.

Personally I have a great private project in mind and a skilled developer 
for it.

The project is blocked because he want to make money now and someone 
who finances the project.

I told him that First of all we must show a concept application. 
This will sell the application itself and we start fundraising.

Until something usable won't be ready I will not be able to sell 
the idea. He refuses this view and we are blocked.


As you are writing a programming language you are in a worst scenarion 
than us.

You need to have a commercial class programming language ready for 
the mass to sell it and this is not the case.

Commercial Class mean: IDE, Solution for interfacing SQL Databases, 
Solutions for communicating, Solutions for interfacing to other projects.

This is too much for one man to accomplish. You need to live, you 
need money and World is your Hobby project (Isn't it ?)


Open sourcing and delegating is the solution for creating a mature 
project: you seth the path, the specifications, the rules, the others 
will help.


I won't give a Penny and Time to REBOL Tech. because its source is 
closed and this model is wasting my precious life waiting for Carl 
to resurrect.

Open Sourcing solves this problem. Don't you think that if REBOL 
was open sourced many developers would have inproved it in Carls 
absence ? Do you think that someone, like an university will donate 
money to a private held project ? I don't think so.


When we (you) will have a mature project and you will be able to 
show to the world the advantages of your solutions money will come.

Think of SQL lite. There is a consortium behind it. Other open source 
solutions have the same consortiums behind them.


There are many ways to raise money: You can produce vertical solutions 
for your baby.You can give consulency to companies and other institutions, 
you can create products with World. These are few that comes into 
my mind.

You list of 5 things:


1) Not sure, I wanna do that. It takes time away from me finishing 
version 1.
2) I have set the goals for ver. 1.
3) No (see Q&A)

4) "Ask for cooperation" - World would need schemes for the different 
protocols. I will welcome others work in that area. Me (and most 
likely others too) would like to see World on more platforms than 
the current 3. Host kit is open source. I will welcome ports to other 
platforms. (That's what I can think of for now, but I'll keep it 
in mind.)

5) It's faster for me to write the documentation than building a 
comm/doc infrastructure. I'll write the World 'bible'. Work has started, 
and I'll use more time on it, when version 1 is a bit closer.

Geomol: do you plan to make money selling the language ?

There are many ways to raise money:
Yes, I know, and I plan to do something about it. :)

do you plan to make money selling the language?

No, that's not in my plan, but who knows, maybe someone wanna pay 
me to open source it or use it in certain projects. I plan to keep 
the language free (no payment to use it), but make money on areas 
connected to the language.

Disadvantages: me loosing focus and loosing time, when having to 
answer all kinds of questions and approve new developments. The horror 
of World being fragmented to 100 versions, where none of them are 
compatible. You wouldn't like that! I make sure, that doesn't happen.


You need surplus of time and resources to open source things like 
this, if you wanna be sure, it doesn't run off rails. Look at how 
many ways, you can do any single thing in Linux. It's way too fragmented 
in most areas.

I feel, trying to do everything has high possibility of failure. 
But being able to integrate with everything could be the way to be 
able to do everything.

I feel not trying to do everything equals failure from the start. 
A language is supposed to cover everything

But doesn't "trying to do everything" mean, it becomes bloated and 
complex?

well, you didn't have direct support for things like Soap in REBOL, 
which I think is a good thing. Being able to integrate with stuff, 
that can do Soap is ok.

Ah, I would like to do compile/reset/at too, so it's maybe a little.

My view is, implementing unicode everywhere will add to unnecesssary 
complexity. Each such level of complexity is a sure step to downfall. 
My first rule of development is simplicity, then performance, then 
low footprint, then maybe features.


Words in World can hold 7-bit ASCII. Chars and strings can hold 8-bit 
characters. That's the level of simplicity, I aim at.


I will have to deal with unicode, of course, and I'll do that, when 
World is a bit more mature. There could be a unicode! datatype.

A word about license, since that has been brought up in different 
groups. The current license for World is simple:


Alpha release. For testing only. Use at your own risk. Do not distribute.


There is a LICENSE function to show that. World is currently an alpha 
version for testing. When World moves to beta stage, I have to figure 
out a proper license. (I think, that's in the Q&A too.)

It's not really junk!, it's human text, encoded as humans see fit, 
gibberish or deep meaning symbolic.

Funny, when I first implemented KWATZ!, I called it gibberish!, but 
I found KWATZ! better suited and more interesting. And it kinda give 
you the same feeling, as when you see a computer go down with a "Guru 
Meditation". :)


And if you don't mind, I may start poking around in your wiki as 
btiffin on GitHub. Feel free to tear any writings apart.

The idea with the wiki is, that it's for everybody to edit, so it's 
not really "mine". And as I have very little time for documentation 
right now, I will only contribute a little. It may be needed to step 
in at some point and clear things up, make different pages consistent 
with each other etc., and that may be me, who does that, but it could 
be somebody else too. For the dictionary, it may be an idea to write 
a script, which does most of the documentation (I think, there's 
an old REBOL script for that lying around somewhere, which may be 
suited with some modification). system/words may be needed to do 
that properly, and that's not in World yet. I produce LaTeX output 
with my NicomDoc format, so I'm covered there with the documentation, 
I'll do (a proper manual).

Regarding cortex.w - is that in the far-plan?

Yes, the binary will be as basic as possible. I even consider removing 
definitions of natives from the binary, as it's possible to define 
them in cortex.w. Same could be done with datatypes with a little 
change to World. Then the binary could only define MAKE and DATATYPE! 
(and probably also SYSTEM), and the rest could be build from that. 
It's a good idea to split the doc up in a native section and a mezzanine 
section. And then there's rebol.w, which will make it possible to 
run even more REBOL scripts. There could be a dictionary for that 
too.

Hi, I am interested into building an maintaining documentation for 
those programming languages based on REBOL.
It would be nice to have a DOCBASE for them.
What I search is:
- Someone ABLE to SETUP the Linux and the Wiki Software
- Someone which would share with me the cost of hosting.
Do you like the idea ?
Write me at [giuseppe-:-chillemi-:-eu]

ok, that's a good argument to do something about it. Thanks!

Thanks, Gregg. Some thoughts...


I create World, because I need the tool. So when I have the functionality 
planned, I've reached one of my goals, because I then have the tool, 
I need for my own future developments. For World to become a success 
for others to use also, it needs to be better in crucial ways than 
the tools, others use today. Therefore I also focus on making World 
slim (not bloated), stable and bug-free, very well defined, easily 
integratable and with good performance. There still is work to do 
in all these areas.

Another try to close the topic on openness: So you expect to get 
man-years of work open-sourced for free? And this in a situation, 
where I get nothing from doing so? Please, be serious! World is not 
a hobby-project for me. I have invested a lot of time and money in 
this.

I have my hands full, and the World project do very good progress 
right now. I see no business benefit from making World open source 
at this point in time.

Case closed. :)

Geomol - it is just that you depreciate psychological factors. Ppl, 
especially with previous experience with RT, are very carefull here. 
In the end, you might just wonder, why noone is interested in such 
a model anymore. And in the end, it is just end result, which matters. 
You either get some community surrounding World, or you might wonder, 
why while your product is excellent, noone really cares anymore. 
Or - you might end up finding some nice niche e.g. embedded market, 
having lots of customers, etc. There is many possibilities, how your 
decision might influence something.


What I really don't understand is one thing - you sound too protective. 
You have full right to sound that way. But what escapes my mind is 
- "when I get nothing from doing so?".  And what do you get from 
actually not doing so? Also - do you expect any harm, caused to the 
business side of your project, by eventually open-sourcing?


As for me - I am used to commercial and licensed products. I just 
wanted to point out, that in the end, your attitude, might be contraproductive. 
If you keep product developed, ppl might feel safe, but ppl might 
also be carefull with their contribution to the project, because 
such kind of REBOL related project already failed big time. Not your 
falt, that's for sure, but the negative assumption is in the air 
nonentheless.

I feel bad because we saw many projects failed because of the same 
reason.


Don't feel bad! A month ago, you didn't know about World. Now you 
do, and now you have an extra option. Where is no reason to feel 
bad.


Afaik projects like Boron are open source, and you may put it in 
the category of "failed projects". So open source doesn't equal success.

A lot of us would like Rebol and its derivatives to  be successful 
because success brings validation, and more importantly brings new 
people and development to Rebol.  We've all seen the closed source 
model fail, and specifically we have seen people leave Rebol or refuse 
to learn Rebol on this account.  Orca and Boron are not relevant 
because there was never a critical mass of people aware of it, and 
the GPL license put commercial developers here off.  Partial open 
source models like R3 would suggest that this model is also not attractive 
enough with a lack of investors to keep Carl working on the project. 
 Perhaps you do have some wonderful business plan that is going to 
work against all odds but the majority of us are not so optimistic. 
  We don't wish to see history keep repeating itself and so we are 
advising you to change your plan.   Think King Canute!

I have some free-lance work to do these days, but will continue work 
on World too.


The next thing for World is finishing the memory handling, so contexts 
are freed completely (problems with functions and blocks within contexts 
today). I'll check cyclic references too. After that, it's the rest 
of the datatypes, functions and better networking.

Geomol: is your freelance work using World-lang, just wondering if 
you find it good enough to do work in yet

OK. How often do you expect new releases then, to keep people interested?

As for me - I do care about the Red - I already donate, and I will 
do so in next few weeks again. In opposition to you, I don't care 
in ANY closed efforts again. I don't care about RT anymore. Carl 
is an ufo :-) I can't accept  ANYONE, behaving like he is. Weren't 
we supposed to know the resolution of our situation? This is total 
crap - Saphirion my ass - Carl is just making joke of us all ...

He said he had some real money making work to do

he had to do some work to pay the bills

Thanks, guys. Easy to do with the right tool, and FreeMind works 
well for me.

We do not need to be too limited, currently the source is R3 specific, 
but I do intend to put in also R2, and the inclusion of other alternatives 
may be a worthy enterprise as well.

yes but it's hard to do it without code evaluation.
Same remarks apply to integer! and decimal! datatypes.

it may be valid but it has nothing to do with a path anymore

Well, I do not know exactly what to do now, there is an option to 
reflect the state in the DECIMAL-SYNTAX definition

Where would we "want" to do that?

The escape decoding gets done too early. The decoding should not 
be done after until the URI structure has been parsed. If you do 
the escape decoding too early, characters that are escaped so that 
they won't be treated as syntax characters (like /) are treated as 
syntax characters erroneously. This is a bad problem for schemes 
like HTTP or FTP that can use usernames and passwords, because the 
passwords in particular either get corrupted or have inappropriately 
restricted character sets. IDN encoding should be put off until the 
last minute too, once we add support for Unicode to the url handlers 
of HTTP, plus any others that should support that standard.

About short Date syntax .
A valid month is taken from system/locale/months:
== ["January" "February" "March" "April" "May" "June"
    "July" "August" "September" "October" "November" "December"
]

The month must be 3 letters a least, but longer sub-strings are valid 
forms as well:

eg. 1-Jan-2000, 1-Janu-2000, 1-Janua-2000,1-Januar-2000,1-January-2000.


One can do a simple rebol function to pick-up a valid month from 
system/locale/months.

Doing this only with plain formal static parse rules would be painfull 
because it should include all the valid sub-strings.
eg. ["Jan" | "Janu" | "Janua" | ...]

What do you think ?