AltME groups: search

the problem is that people expect to do everything on a PC, whereas 
in the 80's, people expected to do everything on a C64.

Version 0.3.0 of BBC BASIC uploaded. Added the rest of the string 
handling: LEFT$, MID$, RIGHT$, STRING$ and INSTR. Added ON, that 
can change the order of execution. Added DIM, which implement arrays. 
Both for integers, reals and strings. To run:
>> do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/bbcbasic.r

List of keywords: http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/bbcbasic.html

Example use of local variables. In line 70, 'a' is local, because 
it's a parameter to the procedure, 'b' is still global. After line 
80, 'b' also become local to the procedure. After returning from 
the procedure, both 'a' and 'b' are set back to their global values. 
In 'proctest', 'a' could have been called anything without changing 
the global 'a'.

>> do http://www.fys.ku.dk/~niclasen/rebol/bbcbasic.html
Script: "BBC BASIC" (27-Jul-2007)
BASIC v. 0.4.0 

>auto
   10 a=42
   20 b=1
   30 proctest(a)
   40 print "line 40 : a=";a " b=";b
   50 end
   60 def proctest(a)
   70 print "line 70 : a=";a " b=";b
   80 local b
   90 a=2:b=2
  100 print "line 100: a=";a " b=";b
  110 endproc
  120 0
>50end
>run
line 70 : a=        42 b=         1
line 100: a=         2 b=         2
line 40 : a=        42 b=         1

Forth has a very (untouchable actually) immersive feel to it.  As 
long as you avoid working with the sad sad current trend of text 
file forth, everything you do in Forth is Forth.  Editor commands...Forth, 
disk management Forth, debugger Forth, locate and cross reference, 
Forth.  Anyway I'm still questing for a REBOL enviroment that allows 
that immersive feel.  No brain switching to Editor, back to console 
command brain, then another brain switch to file manager, bobloblaw. 
 Mondo powerful when you can keep your brain in one mode for a full 
eight hours.  Even building Forth was Forth.  I do kinda miss it, 
but only for semimental reasons.  REBOL is just too cool to think 
about going back.

If I had to quickly pick an order;  REBOL, Forth, SNOBOL, Lisp.  
If I was told I HAD to do it in a class based object oriented language 
I'd probably pick SmallTalk ... no ... I'd probably just leave.  
To be honest, I've rarley seen a DSL that didn't require a programmer 
to script it anyway, so... I find the whole thing kind of moot.  
Moot is the wrong word.  A non-coder MIGHT be able to VID up a GUI 
but I doubt it would do much...or by the time they were done, the 
non-coder would have unknowningly become a coder.  I've not seen 
a DSL I'd turn over to Bob the manager to write progams in.  Even 
languages written to be specific; Erlang for telephony, Forth for 
telescopes, are still programmer languages. REBOL comes soooo close 
to being a data language that humans can use...but unfortunately 
nope;  Programmers required.  The magic all happens when you can 
build up layers, and stand on the shoulders of giants.  Something 
hardware engineers have been doing since day 1...programmers might 
learn by day 32'767 if we get lucky.  No doubt our smartest programmers 
will be fussing with strings 50 years from now with the same basic 
problems and mind sets faced 50 years ago.

It matters if it's a dialect Terry. If you wanted to create a special 
language to discuss neclear physics, do you think it would make a 
difference if you based it on a Mathematical foundation versus Basque?

aha, I would also like to know if that is possible .. I still haven't 
figured out how they do ( some code ) in parse

Robert, if you don't want to use parse rules you might try DO/next. 
Don't use DO/next (or Gabriele's compile-rules) if your dialect data 
can come from an untrusted source - use parse rules and dialect operations 
that call the REBOL functions if necessary.

But *only* the REBOL functions that you want to support and can do 
so safely.

You can't make that restriction with DO/next or Gabriele's compile-rules 
without a sandbox - hard to do in R2.

I'm not saying that I don't support the addition of a DO operation, 
just that it has security implications. I already added DO to the 
Parse Proposals long ago. Here it is: http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Parse_Project#DO

There is more semantic detail in the new DO Parse Proposal than there 
was in your original Parse REP. Being more specific about binding 
issues and error handling deals with most of the security implications. 
This makes the operation *exactly* as secure as DO, and not less 
so. You can even sandbox the data using the same methods you would 
use to sandbox DO in R3.

It also makes the data *exactly* as difficult to sandbox in R2 as 
it is to sandbox R2 DO code :(

I don't have to tell *you* how difficult it is to sandbox DO dialect 
code, Gabriele: You've already done half the work :)

I'm not sure what you mean. Do you want to parse set-words?

you solved my problem and it looks much better in Chris's style.. 
thanks to both

this is now:
	id: required and integer

 name: optional "janko" check ( either current == "janko" [ "can't 
 be janko" ] [ none ] )
	vatnum: optional "11ss" and int
	website: optional "123" and int do ( current: current + 1000 )
	phone: optional "NO" calc ( join "oh-" current )
	adress: optional ""

this was before:

	id required and integer .

 name optional "janko" check ( either current == "janko" [ "can't 
 be janko" ] [ none ] ) .
	vatnum optional "11ss" and int .
	website optional "123" and int do ( current: current + 1000 ) .
	phone optional "NO" calc ( join "oh-" current ) .
	adress optional "" .

You just have to do a little math, if you want the gradient. From 
the oce you can see how to aproach it - VID applies +- 32 tuple offset 
...

Some of the things people do are utterly ridiculous.  They compile 
assembly to DOS .COM files and claim the resulting hex bytes constitute 
program code because you can feed them into the console.  Other approaches 
obfuscate the code beyond belief to where you really can't make the 
slightest change to them--they are effectively not source, but the 
result of a bizarro compilation--often written using some kind of 
assistive tool or calculator.

but in fact it's a little bit cheating, the code cannot be execute 
as-is.

Is there a real difference with the following idiom used to shorten 
rebol sources
>> do load decompress #64{...........}

Well you're free to work out an example of a better dialect but you'll 
be parsing URLs or something... like where I can do Ab to get a: 
b how would you get it?

Well, I understand the concern, but I didn't do it just to be weird. 
 :)

Obviously people who do code golf come to it from different perspectives, 
I think Rebol's key here is just to engage by giving lively and flexible 
solutions which pique interest.  I intentionally didn't clone the 
deranged "winner" of the roman numeral contest because he'd thrown 
out the program logic, it was no longer source code.  I can edit, 
debug, and insert probe messages into mine easily.

What Rebol can do is solve the problem and then do a coup-de-grace, 
like upload the results to a web server or something crazy like that.

Sunanda: The idea of a minor modification to the challenge and seeing 
what that does to the program is a good one; I would do that with 
interview candidates who knew the "right" solution to a problem (due 
to studying or seeing it before)... just introduce some whimsical 
constraint they hadn't memorized...

(Being forced to fire up a VM that is willing to run AltME, having 
it mangle my links, and be unable to do "shift up" and have my entire 
line selected or get a right click menu is... well, I'm a sympathetic 
audience, but there's just no comparison to how slick StackOverflow 
is.)

In my opinion, standardizing Rebmu would be far wiser than decisions 
in Rebol/Core like defining Q to be QUIT (I've pointed out how accidents 
involving this make Rebol seem like it crashes, like when you do 
APPEND [N O P] Q and forget the quote mark on Q).

Which leads to the question of why map the words in the do dialect 
at all, and not just derebmu the whole thing before execution.  (I 
think it's just a different way of thinking about what to do with 
the word map, not a tremendously big deal.)

Since English is not my native language, I have experiences with 
internationalization myself dating back to 1978, but the main result 
is, that such languages as the Do dialect e.g. are better when not 
internationalized.

I agree with Brian and Ladislav that "internationalization" of a 
programming language makes no sense at all. Not sure why only some 
americans think it does. :-) ALIAS may not be there in R3 but I'm 
not sure why you should be worried about R3 at this point; but in 
that case you can do the compilation on R3 and use ALIAS in R2, so 
I don't see it as a big issue even if you want to worry about R3. 
:)

hmm, AFAIK, the reason Carl wanted to remove ALIAS is that in 10 
years of R2 nobody ever really used it except to show what it can 
do.

At this moment I'm able to connect it event with IRC servers, but 
I do it know just from home

And what exactlu do you want to know, just use #include instead of 
'do' and %prebol.r to build it.

Need some help...Can't seem to get Uniserv working on my XP laptop. 
 This is my first try...so I don't have enough experience to see 
what is happening.  Do I have the wrong version of core?

>> uniserve/boot
[uniserve] Async Protocol Admin loaded
[uniserve] Async Protocol DNS loaded
[uniserve] Async Protocol FastCGI loaded
[uniserve] Async Protocol HTTP loaded

** Script Error: change expected series argument of type: series 
port
** Where: install-plugin
** Near: change pos/2 new
>>

Doc, do you continue to devleop Universe or is it that matured that 
it's just working?

it states stable, but it really is not. Doc, before he left scene 
for another few months :-), stated something like that he has new 
reimplemented session handling, which is going to be "soon" released. 
But don't take it for granted, maybe I misunderstood something. But 
really - sessions do not work properly ... There is a demo with multiple 
frames, e.g. Mozilla (but even IE) did not open all boxes, there 
were some errors or timeouts, dunno ...

Will, if you have contact to conference organisers, please urge them 
to do something with DevCon preparation. Som of us have to plan our 
plane or bus few months ahead. I would like to see site updated ...

very interesting tool ... i go to do a site on it

I figured out how to stop the service tying up the 80 port , When 
i run this is what I get: >> do %/c/temp/rebol/uniserve/uni-engine.r
== true
>> uniserve/boot
[uniserve] Async Protocol Admin loaded
[uniserve] Async Protocol DNS loaded
[uniserve] Async Protocol FastCGI loaded
[uniserve] Async Protocol HTTP loaded

** Script Error: change expected series argument of type: series 
port
** Where: install-plugin
** Near: change pos/2 new

I don't know, I never used Rugby and don't know what you want to 
do:)

and do we have access to that httpd source? Cheyenne is encapped, 
no?

(not just httpd as it is able to do for example bzip2 compression 
so it probably needs some libs)

it works, but you have to do some small changes:-)

Surely you are not surprised that Doc would disappear abruptly? He 
seems to have even less time than I do.

let me rephrase that .. no one outside of RT and their contractors 
know how to do this.

but at this moment have other things to do

To determine if you can leave the work inside the callback, just 
do some simple maths. E.g., if a request needs 50ms to be processed, 
that means that your server cannot do more than 20req/s. So it also 
depends on the load your server need to handle.

You could take advantage of Uniserve's task dispatch and process 
management to do load balancing between LNS servers.

Doc, what I want to do is do some text to speech using a 3rd party 
web service.  I need to download the generated wave file and play 
it by inserting it into a sound port.

The read would be blocking if I use sync read, and then playing it 
thru a sound port in my experience does interfere with async tcp.

In a nutshell, is this sort of activity suitable for a task-master 
service .. and is there a simple sample of such a service?
The task would be triggered from an RSP page

is there a way to get one of those helper processes to do this?

So you think that using something like:
...
uniserve/boot/no-wait
forever [
	wait 0:0:1
	foreach-listener-write-enough-data-to-play-1s
]
...
is not good approach?

I think I cannot do it from 'on-write as this would require to have 
separate input for each listener, which I don't want.

What happens is I write on port which does not finished previous 
write?

just tried to add this before cheyenne starts:
do-events: does [
	forever [wait [0:0:1] print now/time/precise]
]
And from second console run:
loop 1000 [read http://localhost]


the result is, that it prints the time in every second while it serves 
the requests.

It was useful on client side to kickstart first packet sent to a 
server (kind of fast shortcut to avoid a round in event loop before 
sending the first packet), but I had more issues than benefits from 
it, so I left the code deactivated in case I would need it in future, 
but it looks like I could remove those lines. Do you have a need 
for it?

The balloon goes up! I want to move Rugby's transport layer to Uniserve, 
or even better, Cheyenne. (http tunneling). For this to really work 
I only need to know if you have primitives for timers in the event 
loop (inside the 'wait): do-every time! [ code ]  do-after time! 
[code]

Basically, I need a way to do client to client communications with 
Uniserve, much like say a chat server.

Yes, surely parse can do it... I am just debating .. I am not sure 
if mongrell is really that awesome.


I was thinking that speedwise the upper bound of the http server 
is determined by socket handling and http parsing probably? Meaning 
that even if you have everything in ram and prepared you can't serve 
more thatn that. Cheyenne has a *very* high upper bound for a dynamic 
language (I was many times expressing my surprise and getting 250 
req/s was the reason I returned back to rebol with doing all webapps 
in it now).

For the "IRC" client, I'm not clear on how to build the list of ports 
in Uniserve for all connected users. On the on-new-client function, 
do I do something like append shared/client-list self?

Gabriele do you plan to retransmit throught internet the devcon like 
it have been done last year ?? If yes the best tool possible would 
be NSV and NullSoft Shoutcast serveur (but it depends too on the 
disponnible materials :)

But hey they do have money and professional cameras, bw, video switcher, 
and so they throw a lot of money to make his "Keynotes" remarkable.

We should have a discussion forum slot and/or hack-a-solution session. 
 It will be good if we could have a project to tackle together, besides 
presenting . This could help us either build new mezz, or prototype 
some ideas. We could post ideas on what to do in the hack session 
ahead of time.

I will probably go directly for devcon to Milan, leaving Rome visit 
for some later time once I will be rich :-) Well, I will see - I 
need to talk to Cyphre and Ladislav how do we travell. If we can 
go by one car, the expenses will be lower of course ...

it is also possible to do that after the "conference", i.e. after 
4 pm. plenty of time till night ;)

in all cases REbGUI must be presented as a main effort of cooperativ 
work on a bettring VID project that commes from the ground (people 
like me the basement or rebol coder community and not REbol Technology) 
This kind of work are essential iMO for a better diffusion of rebol 
and to make lighter the work of CARL upon REBOL VM ... Do carl can 
handle all alone ? Can't we apport a sort pf answer and show to rebolers 
and to RT that cooperativ work and hudge project are pretty usefull 
for educationnal purposes but for rebol large diffusion and adoption 
by the professional area ?

It IS what REBOL needs most, applications which are complete, professional, 
and good examples to others what REBOLers can do.

what do you need to know exactly? i'll ask mario if he has any plans 
ready...

2) What do we visit together in Rome. Everything on the Linea 110open 
path ? It's just to organise visits for the previous days with my 
wife.

Hopefully, since it is a wrapper for COM, you should be able to do 
anything that COM allows you to do. So the answers to all these types 
of questions are to be found by researching COM land (which I myself 
am not very familiar with).

Anton, it looks like you have done some work with interfacing with 
Outlook. I'm trying to create an appointment invitation function. 
Does your com lib do that? By the way, the old link seems down. Thanks 
in advance

(And COMLib has no string conversion support functions at the moment 
- you'll have to do any string conversions yourself.)

hello, i m working on a programm that must interact with outlook 
and the number dialer of windows ... can someone tell me where do 
i have to look for documentation on it ? does anybody already did 
it ?

But I can see in the word-open-save.r demo I have done this:

	do/args %../COMLib.r [
		...

  word_doc: GetObject [word_obj ".Documents.Open(%s)" to-local-file 
  clean-path %demos/word-open.doc]

doc has software to do this

Any idea how I can get rid of the "Do you want to save changes" dialog 
when I close an XLS workbook?

Have you already consulted http://support.microsoft.com/kb/213428/EN-US/
? Maybe that's what you're looking for.


The trick seems to be to do set ThisWorkbook.Saved = True, so that 
Excel responds as though the workbook has already been saved and 
no changes have occurred since that last save.

I want to do:

VBA-Code: ActiveSheet.Copy After:=Workbooks(2).Sheets(3)
	

And I use:
								

objectMethod excel-app ".ActiveSheet.Copy After:=Workbooks(%d).Sheets(%d)" 
reduce [workbook worksheet]



But this doesn't work. XLS creates a new document with the copy worksheet 
inserted. Looks like the stuff after .Copy isn't recognized. Any 
idea?

No, but if you want to do this, create HTML files with XLS endings 
using TABLE. Excel will magically load these as normal XLS files 
;-)

Yeah, sorry. .org. It's late here. I was reading up on the Skype 
1.0.33 and it looks like there were some install and usage issues 
though I don't know if that has anything to do with what I was experiencing.

How would you do the following in Cheyenne?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+) /cgi-bin/qm.r [QSA,L]


Also, is there an equivalent to -- get-env "REQUEST_URI" -- in Cheyenne?

Looking for it in the CGI handler.  Request_URI isn't in the system/options/cgi 
block -- even using Apache, I have to do get-env "REQUEST_URI"

For example, if there was a way of hijacking 404s, passing the 'request 
uri' as do/args to %qm.r, that would work too...

My Cheyenne installation has been modified, but I've noticed crashes 
when adding a trailing slash to an existing file (eg. http://cheyenne/index.html/). 
 I think this happens out the box in mod-static -- when you do info? 
%/path/to/file.r/ and file.r exists, it will return info/type of 
'file but when you read %/path/to/file.r/ you get an error.  Is this 
correct? -- view 1.3.50.3.1 core 2.7.0

btw - could I do following? Set my .html files to be treated as CGI, 
via some handler? I can't stand using mixing templates with html 
codes, especially in that manner, where your template code ruins 
normal browser display ....

I simply want my index.html (or other) to be submitted to mine registered 
cgi, which I call rsp.cgi. This "dispatcher" looks into list, if 
this page is registered as dynamic, and if not, returns requested 
html page directly, or scans it for module names, which are then 
loaded and know what to do. I simply want my gfx man to have free 
hands, not requiring to fill any rebol code into templates - just 
marking sections ...

you could pretty easly write a mod, you may able to do that with 
mod-rewrite which get called in the url-translate phase

Btw, the encapping system for Cheyenne is a little odd : to be able 
to run it in normal mode and encap mode without changing the source 
code, I wrote a special lib emulating the filesystem but in memory. 
I didn't had time yet to check if Ladislav's Include could do the 
job. My encapping system needs to generate a .encap-fs file, so it 
needs that Cheyenne be run in normal mode at least once. I'll document 
that in a few days.

Im looking to run my Uniserve service along side of Cheyenne.. using 
a particular port.. but the one last thing i need to do is pass messages 
from the httpd to the service.. will this be trivial?

Basically, you just need to look at cheyenne.r and add an entry in 
the set-cache block, then add a : do-cache uniserve-path/services/your-service.r 
before calling uniserve/boot.

I have access to FreeBSD boxes (or will have access very soon), so 
I can encap it. I think Jaime may be able to do this as well.

I prefer the REBOL binary to remain small. I should put a mysql.r 
and cheyenne.r file somewhere on my website and give out the URL, 
so you could just : do http://.../mysql.rto install and run it.

but mods have a special loader, so if you want to reload a changed 
module, you need to unload the previous one and do some internal 
cleanup in Cheyenne. This "unload and cleanup" part need to be implemented 
to be able to reload an active module. OTOH, loading a new module 
could be done right now without any issue (remains untested).

Has anyone tested php on windows. And do I need to uncomment : ;	bind 
fastcgi to [.php .php3 .php4] and :;	extern fastcgi [
;		command	 "php -b $port"
;		pool 	 min 1 max 4
;		server	 192.168.0.100 ; port 1234
;		root-dir "/home/dk/fcgi/"
;	]

It will be interesting to see what kind of mashups we can do between 
Rebol and PHP.
I've found PHP's XML handling particularily nice.

Or, do I edit cheyenne.r to do that?

Right, using 'do-SQL makes Cheyenne manage the connection for you. 
You need to define your DB connections specs in the httpd.cfg file, 
like this for example :

then, if you're not using RT's DB drivers, you need to load your 
driver somewhere : %misc/rsp-init.r or %www/your-app/app-init.r (if 
you've defined a webapp) are good places to do so.

why do you want to close the db connection?

re 2005 version: you're don't need to use do-sql if you don't want 
to. You can do it as usual by opening connection, sending query...closing 
connection. do-sql is just a higher level wrapper to save you some 
time.

Right, but only if you're inside a web-app container (defined in 
the config file). Otherwise, it's up to you to do the checking.

if you're using the odbc:// driver, like all RT's DB drivers, it 
requires a : first db-port to open the connection port, so you have 
to change the do-sql source a little bit (in %handler/RSP.r file), 
in do-sql source :

I don't want to post off-topic here, but as you are here guys - do 
you think that it would be vital/possible, for R3, to create some 
DB abstraction schema?Kind of ODBC, JDBC --> RDBC? So that we could 
use the same syntax and just choose the driver underneath?

You can use it freely with Cheyenne. If it has a standard scheme 
interface (like sqlbd://), it may work with 'do-sql, otherwise, it's 
up to you to do the opening/closing part.