AltME groups: search

James, what do you want to do with your grid of toggles ? (sounds 
like could be used for an audio application, like drum patterns). 
Do you want them to have different texts and colors as well, etc. 
?

Anton, again thanks for your expert help. What I am trying to do 
is to set up a grid that has 15 minute increments as toggles for 
a whole day. To make it easier for the user, I wanted to have the 
4 columns: morning, afternoon,evening and night. Your program helped 
me with getting the rows to be different but the columns were the 
same. Just minutes ago the idea came to me that perhaps I have been 
approaching it all wrong and the simple answer (although not too 
elegant perhaps) was to just create 4 individual lists across. It 
works so now I can clean up my "scratch" app and move on to making 
the actual tool. Thanks Anton. You don't know how much you have helped.

I would like to ask, what aproach do others take?

Hi there i recently had to do a job where i need to make use of read-net 
or read-thru because i needed to show a graph representing the amount 
of data beeing downloaded, but when it comes to write or save this 
is not possible because no callback is addmited, so i ask, is there 
a way to know how much data form a file has been uploaded or saved 
?

Sorry, need to update window.r probably. Do this:
	load-thru/update site/library/window.r

Robert, you can see http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-system.html#section-10
for more insight on how pane functions work.

An iterated face function is there to save memory, so it must be 
executed every time the display is refreshed. It creates the illusion 
of many faces by moving one face around very quickly.
It does not create and position new faces like LAYOUT.

What LAYOUT allows you to do is set up the pane function that will 
be used afterwards when SHOW is used or VIEW is used and events start 
flowing.

Anton, maybe this is to way to do it? It seems to work:

change at image1 5x5 copy/part at image2 10x10 20x20

Yes, that is the way to do it.

hmm, i think what your are trying to do is what the panel accessors 
do by default (warning: a bit bugged, but easily fixable)

you could set the window accessor object to the default panel accessor 
objects, so that you can do the above with the window directly too.

I'm expecting you're doing a show every time there is a scroller 
movement. What you want to do is check if the current row (ie. the 
one at the top of your list) has changed If so, show the list. If 
not, ignore. Not all the shows are necessary.

Since customizing buttons comes sometimes up, i just found this link: 
http://www.rebol.com/how-to/btns-cust.html. Did not know that image 
can do that :)

Is there a way to draw a dot with the draw dialect? I'm looking for 
a way to do it with the draw dialect, and not just a poke in the 
image, so e.g. line-width will take effect. A line, where start- 
and end-point is the same, is not shown. A circle with radius 1 is 
not a dot, but slightly larger. Any ideas?

I am sure Cyphre has this on his to do list already.

Is there any documentation on how the windowsXP-like buttons in View1.3 
are made? They are bitmapped, right? I remember the community help 
that Carl had for making this over a year ago for the first betas. 
I will need this for some custom buttons for a project that I'm going 
to do; converting a fully graphical HTML GUI to VID while it keeps 
the same look.

That might be a good way to do it. Let's see...

Generic newbie-like question: I was spying on source request-dir 
and am baffled as to how it works? There are many function names, 
I can't seem to access directly, such as F-LIST and DIROUT. Where 
do they come from?

request-dir: func [
    "Requests a directory using a popup list."
    /title "Change heading on request." title-line
    /dir "Set starting directory" where [file!]
    /keep "Keep previous directory path"
    /offset xy
][
    if block? dirout [
        dirout: layout dirout
        max-dirs: to-integer f-list/size/y - 4 / f-txt/size/y
        center-face dirout
    ]
    set-face f-title any [title-line "Select a directory:"]
    if not all [keep path] [
        path: copy either where [clean-path where] [what-dir]
    ]

    if all [not empty? path slash = last path] [remove back tail path]
    last-path: path
    result: none
    show-dir
    either offset [inform/offset dirout xy] [inform dirout]
    result
]

... as for request-dir - today I saw another native one dialog. Dunno 
programmers do have to produce one themselves or not. It was with 
mySQL installation procedure. I looked like typical Windows request-file 
requestor, but it had set filter to "directory". Could anyone check 
on that, please? I really do not like that inconsistency in rebol 
...

crude prototype, but it helped me find the file I had been looking 
for :-) I don't know how  to do actual multi columns with the internal 
text-list. the plan was to allow scrolling (I can't get that working) 
and when you click on a search result, the file pops up in the viewtop 
editor. feel free to perfect it...

Good to know, Cyphre. And thanks guys! Preciate it. I hope, this 
'little' project will turn out well. I need a DPaint program to do 
the graphics for a phone-game, I'm involved in.

There seem to be a small anomaly, when doing thick circles and ellipses, 
in the right side, where the circle/ellipse starts and ends. It may 
have something to do with "line-cap round", but if that is left out, 
there will be a tiny gap, when drawing really thick circles/ellipses.

Maybe Cyphre should check it out!?

james_nak, uploaded new version with right-click for drawing black. 
I'll wait with possibility to choose right-click color, until I do 
GUI.

Problem in "Canvas" is, that I do lots of things depending on tool, 
when the mouse is pressed. That now also has to be done, when a key 
is being pressed. Not good. I'll make sure, you can't change tool 
while drawing. Will solve problem.

I don't have much time today, but next thing, I'll do, is to reimplement 
the brush, so different shapes are possible. And so you can select 
an area of the image as a brush.

What is a good way to check for certain values in an input field?

Let's say, I want to do an integer field, I've tried this as the 
action function:

if error? try [to-integer value] [set-face face 0]


It works first time, but if I try enter an integer afterwards, it 
just get settet to zero again. Any ideas?

So, mostly, if you work with SQL, you try to find the right context 
of data, limiting your query as much as possible. Then you do a query, 
receive result and browse it. In that case, you already have all 
your data in rebol block already (unless you are reading them from 
port continuously), and it has nothing to do with SQL database anymore 
...

Not using a cursor. Right key action  increments current-record-key. 
Retrieves single row for current-record-key, Displays page with data 
for row retrieved.  The database is local and only has (so far) 120 
rows but I have another with three hundred shorter records (no BLOBs) 
on it and it works well without any wait.  i.e. I can hold down the 
right key and it will flash each page by.  MySQL protocol has always 
seemed very fast to me.  Is it possible that View is stacking up 
the key actions and hanging after it gets too many?  p.s. I don't 
want to read the whole database content into memory because then 
I have to worry about locking when I allow HTML updates to it by 
others.  Single row updates with the last update 'winning' in the 
unlikely event of a collision works well for what I need to do.

Pekr, it actually didn't do a list. Instead it sent individual emails. 
Also I probed send and there is a '/show'' option that will replace 
the to: address. checking...

but there were cases , where I failed even inside of 'try block, 
maybe if function contains other functions, dunno ... I am really 
not an expert in all that throwing errors principles ... Ladislav 
or other folks here will do much better service to you :-)

>> do http://www.rebol.org/library/scripts/helloworld.r
connecting to: www.rebol.org
Script: "Great Computer Language Shootout : hello" (27-Sep-2005)
hello world

It's unknown at this point whether DELECT will remain: The command-processing 
functionality of DELECT has been moved into DO-COMMAND. I'm guessing 
that DELECT will end up being a preprocessor that generates DO-COMMAND 
blocks; the wiki you mentioned says that a similar preprocessor is 
run on Draw blocks before they are sent to DO-COMMAND (the "For special 
draw dialects..." paragraph).

Rebol could do this by default, but people screw up enough as it 
is.  Is it worth the potential errors to allow this?  Absolutely 
not...

what I do is normally wrap such code in an ALL block. NONE can mean 
so many things and it's best to trap a NONE where you know it appears 
during an operation that requires a series as input.

Yep, this discussion is recurring. There are pros and cons.
I would like to know the opinion of Carl about this.

#[none] could be a special "transient" value which impacts the behavior 
of DO .

Allowing to passthru a chain of functions without breaking the flow.

And since REBOL can't see your reaction, it has to go by what you 
said to do, not what think you wanted it to do.

I know what you mean, as appending none to a block does add a "none". 
 Though APPEND [A B] NONE currently seems to do the same thing as 
APPEND [A B] 'NONE.  I would be interested to know the side effects 
of saying APPEND [A B] NONE gave [A B] while APPEND [A B] 'NONE gave 
[A B NONE].

What you said to do is append none to a string. By your reaction, 
you wanted to append an empty string to the string. That means this 
(assuming that you don't know that the none is there):
>> append "mystring" any [none ""]
== "mystring"

The need for none to be explicitly converted to other values, rather 
than implicitly, is an intentional design choice that has been applied 
to a great deal of R3. It is not an error.

The trick for language design is not to get rid of idioms, but instead 
to do whatever you can to make possible to make simple idioms more 
powerful. This is usually done by making the different parts of the 
language fit together better, and and more flexibly. You get more 
flexibility by making the core concepts simpler, and then making 
them as widely and consistently applicable as you can without breaking 
them. Consistency is key here, and not just key in a positive way. 
More consistency means that you can fit more of the parts of the 
language together better. However, you have to limit consistency 
to places where it makes sense, and has real benefits. False consistency 
can get in your way.

Nice! But you have to do it in sections of 10 or less, due to the 
length of tuples; not a complaint, a gotcha to look out for.

Hello - hope someone can find the newbie mistake I'm making here. 
 Wanted to use REBOL to tackle a need to get data from Salesforce 
using their SOAP API.  New to SOAP, WSDL and Salesforce, but using 
SoapUI mananged to do this POST (edited only to hide personal info):

POST https://login.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/19.0HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
SOAPAction: ""
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: login.salesforce.com
Content-Length: 525


<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:urn="urn:partner.soap.sforce.com">
   <soapenv:Header>
      <urn:CallOptions>
         <urn:client></urn:client>
         <urn:defaultNamespace></urn:defaultNamespace>
      </urn:CallOptions>
   </soapenv:Header>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <urn:login>
         <urn:username>[jort-:-xxxxxxxxxxxxx-:-com]</urn:username>

         <urn:password>xxxxxxxxxx78l6g7iFac5uaviDnJLFxxxxx</urn:password>
      </urn:login>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

and get the desired response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: 
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 736
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:32:14 GMT


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns="urn:partner.soap.sforce.com" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"><soapenv:Body><loginResponse> 
......

Then using SoapUI I am able to send a successful Logout message.


Using REBOL 2.7.7.3.1, I created an "upload" string containing the 
POST block above without the "POST " at the beginning, set my url 
to:

>> url
== https://login.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/19.0

and tried this:

>> response: read/custom url reduce ['POST upload]

but consistently get a Server 500 error:


** User Error: Error.  Target url: https://login.salesforce.com:443/services/Soap/u/19.0 
could not be retrieved.  Se
rver response: HTTP...
** Near: response: read/custom url reduce ['POST upload]

For completeness, here's the upload value:

>> print mold upload
{https://login.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/19.0HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
SOAPAction: ""
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: login.salesforce.com
Content-Length: 525


<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:urn="urn:partner.soap.sforce.com">

   <soapenv:Header>
      <urn:CallOptions>
         <urn:client></urn:client>
         <urn:defaultNamespace></urn:defaultNamespace>
      </urn:CallOptions>
   </soapenv:Header>
   <soapenv:Body>
      <urn:login>
         <urn:username>[jort-:-researchpoint-:-com]</urn:username>

         <urn:password>metrics12378l6g7iFac5uaviDnJLFVprDl</urn:password>
      </urn:login>
   </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>}

Would appreciate any help you can give!

IIRC, I used a dash for empty cells. For export purposes, if you 
really need it blank, you may need to use a special value and then 
post-process it out. I don't know how to do a blank value right off 
either. All the normal tricks of NONE or () won't work in this context.

everything I try seems to get taken as a literal value, so a dash 
will be a dash.

Extra blank lines do not work, if that's what you mean by folded.

I''m trying to understand this language, sometimes getting it, sometimes 
not. Anyway here's my question.

In VID, I have a layout.  I want to put random images in 3 columns 
with 5 rows.  The images are stored together in a single binary file. 
(this is a mod of the card game on Nick's tutorial site).


So I read in the images into a series,  after I set the layout. But 
how do add those to the layout?

Here's my current code:
do %cards.r

the-tableau: layout [
	size 320x480 backdrop 0.170.0
	across
	at 30x20 tc1: box 80x100 teal 
	tc2: box 80x100 teal 
	tc3: box 80x100 teal return
	at 30x130 tc4: box 80x100 teal
	tc100: box 80x100 coal
	tc5: box 80x100 teal return
	at 30x240 tc6: box 80x100 teal
	tc200: box 80x100 coal
	tc7: box 80x100 teal return
	at 30x350 tc8: box 80x100 teal
	tc9: box 80x100 teal
	tc10: box 80x100 teal
]

foreach [card label num color pos] cards [
	
	dimg: load to-binary decompress (card)
	append deck-cards dimg ;feel movestyle
	throw-away-label: label
	append deck-cards-num num
	append deck-cards-color color
	throw-away-pos: pos
]

view/new the-tableau

do-events

in REBOL all functions return a value, even if you do not use the 
return word (its actually better not to use return explicitely, since 
its faster)


so the random-card function returns an image!  from the card-images 
block.


the set-face function applies the image to its default meaning for 
that style.

ok.  I think I understand that.  So here's my new code, which doesn't 
work.
random/seed now

;--include the binary card data
do %cards.r

the-tableau: layout [
	size 320x480 backdrop 0.170.0
	style tabstyle image 80x100 teal
	style holdplace box 80x100 coal
	across
	at 30x20 tc1: tabstyle
	tc2: tabstyle 
	tc3: tabstyle return
	at 30x130 tc4: tabstyle
	tc100: holdplace
	tc5: tabstyle return
	at 30x240 tc6: tabstyle
	tc200: holdplace
	tc7: tabstyle return
	at 30x350 tc8: tabstyle
	tc9: tabstyle
	tc10: tabstyle
]

lc: copy []
lc: [tc1 tc2 tc3 tc4 tc5 tc6 tc7 tc8 tc9 tc10]

deck-cards: copy [] 	; The deck holds all of the cards from the binary 
file
deck-cards-num: copy []
deck-cards-color: copy []

foreach [card label num color pos] cards [
	
	dimg: load to-binary decompress (card)
	append deck-cards dimg ;feel movestyle
	throw-away-label: label
	append deck-cards-num num
	append deck-cards-color color
	throw-away-pos: pos
]

random-card: does [pick deck-cards random length? deck-cards]
foreach c lc [set-face get c deck-cards]

view/new the-tableau

do-events

I've got important work to do right now, but if you can wait, I can 
give you a working solution later.

Note I added a bit of meat to the do-events topic raised by Graham, 
as an extra answer.

and yes... it would be swell if you rate the answer as the final 
one  (shameless I know, but worth the time and effort Me thinks  
;-)

Geomol's complex number library represents a workable approach to 
implementing a large integer math library. But has anyone already 
implemented one? That is, bc's ability to do +, -, *, and / on very 
large numbers? I've been trying to call bc from REBOL using the CALL 
stmt, but success has so far eluded me.

I have an old string-math lib. I don't remember how complete it is, 
but the basic ops should work. May no be applicable to what you want 
to do.

Easy to see for example in code so simple as

>> a: b: c: func [ ] [print "What's my name?"]
>> do [a b c]

It is really quite similar to what a compiler for a language with 
lexical scoping does internally, but we do it at runtime instead.

Hi, I had to drive 100 miles to pick up my son nexpectedly.  So my 
apologies for not responding straight away. Thanks very much for 
your responses.

Gregg, I am not doing anything to send data to the session because 
I dont know how to I am afraid. 

you mention INSERT, but even after looking at the telent.r code I 
am afraid I can work out what to do.


Steeve, the target device is a CIsco router so I think it would be 
happy with crlf or just cr

I am afraid I will have to be off to bed now, but hopefully a few 
small pointers will get me thinking in the right direction.
Thanks

I was confused by the insert function in the telnet scheme vs the 
use of INSERT in rebol but I have discovered that
insert port "username" 

does what I was trying to do, looks like I need to sort out the crlf 
issues but I think I am getting somewhere with it now.   

I am also unable to identify the method to disconnect, the telnet 
RFC mentions an "Interrupt Process" code 244, bit I dont see that 
implimented in the code..   Thanks.

Thanks Greg.   I didnt realise the Telnet scheme "port" concept was 
a Rebol generic thing, I mistakenly thought it was specific to the 
undocumented telnet scheme.   Looks like I need to do a close port

This is great, I am now getting somewhere.  Thanks again for your 
help.  

Will R3 impliment telnet as a native? Or is it too soon to ask?

Question from ThomasP : 
how can I create a local SMTP server?
the SMTP server should run in the background, I just do:
set-net [127.0.0.1] to send my mail
I find simulator SMTP server on the web, but no real server.

in the above you use   cin   ...   do you expect the input to be 
piped ?

the console is for one-line inputs, if you want to type in your code 
directly. that interactive use of REBOL.


the way you want to do this, is create a script in notepad, and run 
the script from the REBOL console

open a REBOL console and type:

do %/path/to/test.r

well guys i have to say the community works and i am pleasntly impressed.I 
am checking the libraries now and trying to get the script to work 
since i am getting  ** Access Error: Cannot open /C/users/alemar/download/test.r
** Where: halt-view

** Near: do %/C/users/alemar/download/test.r                     
                                                                 
                   i will figure it out eventually and i can get 
to real programing in this langueage** Access Error: Cannot open 
/C/users/alemar/download/test.r

the R2 console can actually act like a shell.


in the latest release (2.7.8) they added posix style shortcuts to 
the various file operations directly... so you can do:

>> cd %/C/users/alemar/download/
>> ls

it`s barely 22:30 but i got a lot to do tommorow

In R2, you can do this:

1. get the body of the object as a block
2. find the word you want to remove
3. remove the word and its value coming right after
4. make a new object from the block

BrianH said: "But you can create a new object without the field,...."

Sorry to be especially dense, but do you mean create the new object 
from scratch, or based on the old object?  I've seen the examples 
to create new from old and also adding fields, or resetting the value 
of an existing field, but never excluding old fields.


I look forward to more documentation on "map!"; maybe I should move 
to R3.  Last I checked, there was no GUI in R3, even the Windows 
version, despite what the download page says?


One last newbie question for the day - will there be a 64-bit REBOL? 
 I'm thinking my data could get rather large before too long.  Thanks 
to all of you!

Sorry to be especially dense, but do you mean create the new object 
from scratch, or based on the old object?
 - specially in this case he means the above example

Can i use a bigger font?

I can't reach the resize button to reduce the window somewhatt. How 
can this be done?

Is it possible to do a search in a group or the whole of ta world?

Seems i have a settings of 800
Looks OK to me.    
What 3d party browsers do exist?

todun - read http://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-6.htmlIt 
shows you how to handle a series.   Getting to the End, backing up 
a character, and removing it might work.   If you just want to remove 
the last character you can always do that in one simple line.  Remember 
to save the full series from the head.    If you are not sure the 
last character is a LF then you need to add a test ... still in the 
same line if you want to scrunch it.

how do I make the data loaded from the file change to another token 
in the file when I click another button?

@Pekr, to clarify. Using the right-click does show an Alert button 
that I have "copied to clipboard" but does not twll me what to do.

is there a way to make the ALTME push my message to you guys without 
having to do "CNTRL + S" all the time?

Some might want to use ! as NOT, like in other languages. You can 
do that by:

>> !: :not
>> if ! 2 > 4 [print "it's true"]
it's true

Linux copy/paste:


To copy from AltME to somewhere else, right-clicking on a URL will 
copy it to the clipboard, right clicking on text will copy the entire 
thing to the clipboard, or highlighting it and pressing CTRL + C 
will copy it to the clipboard.  To paste it somewhere else, use the 
middle mouse button.


To go from somewhere else to AltME, highlight the text (which automatically 
copies it), then in AltME press CTRL + V


It's confusing because AltME accesses the X clipboard, and uses CTRL+C/CTRL+V 
to do so, while traditionally the X clipboard is just highlight to 
copy/middle-click to paste.  CTRL+C/CTRL+V elsewhere on linux accesses 
a different clipboard

@Henrik, ok. I'm trying your first suggestion but it doesn't work. 
I'm trying to do the second one to see if it will work now....

do you not want the DO block in the layout to be performed after 
FLASHCARD-PARSING? otherwise the questions-list.txt file is not generated 
in time.

based on its content, there is no reason to put the DO block in the 
layout.

I am not sure how to do these individual steps yet, but I actually 
do understand the gist of them.

@Henrik, ok. But I do want to explore the options you present because 
it meets my other goal of working with different data structures 
in rebol.

@Henrik, do you have any advice as to the sort of things I can be 
learning if  I want to understand REBOL better? Like specific problem 
sets for instance.. The tutorials are good, but they don't seem to 
be getting across to me.

@Henrik, I do need to do a next in the button so that whenever the 
button is pressed, the next question comes up. Is there a way of 
 "holding" the list so it doesn't move around while I try to modify 
it?

@Henrik, the error had to do with the view. I am putting that on 
hold for now.

With VID, each action should not be run, unless you are passing some 
kind of event to a face. you are probably describing your actions 
in blocks in VID, like this:

button "hello" [do stuff here]


it should not do anything outside it, unless you have set up a timer 
(which I doubt) or a FEEL (which I'm not sure you have learned yet), 
so there is probably something wrong in the action code that is run 
as you click your button.

todun -  I am not a good programmer, so difficult to say :-) But 
- many ppl get into some gotchas, when using REBOL. Btw - do you 
know, that subobjects (objects inside objects) are shared?

it's simpler than one might think:

if you have two objects, one made from the other:

a: make object! [num: 5]
b: make a [num: 7]


if you do this without showing this part to another person, that 
person can't tell which object came first, only that two objects, 
A and B exist in memory. so there are no real prototypes.

Could you also Pastebin a sample of  %temp-cards.txt so we can test 
the code to see in action what you want it do do ?

Todun, just some of my thoughts. I think you are changing the order 
of the cards ito indicate the difficulty of a question. When you 
are saving the %temp-cards.txt, you are at a particular position 
in your series because of the  "qa: next qa"  so when you save/all 
it is saving the series from the current position to the end. If 
you want to save the whole series, you can add  "head qa" which will 
bring the pointer back to the first  item for the save but leave 
your pointer at the current question.
It may help to do some simple tests:
>> a: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10]
== [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10]
>> a: next a
== [2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10]
>> save %test.txt a
>> read %test.txt
== "2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10"
>> save %test.txt head a
>> read %test.txt
== "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10"
 move/to a 5
== [6 7 8 9 10]
>> save %test.txt head a
>> read %test.txt
== "1 3 4 5 2 6 7 8 9 10"

etc. 


Also I like to add "probe" as in "probe qa" to different places in 
my code so I can see what is happening internally as I do stuff.


Finally, might I suggest that you actually approach the issue in 
a different way altogether? You can have a block that  has some metadata 
in it so that a question's difficulty can be assessed by other means 
such the word "hard" or some number such as 1 = easy and 10 = hard, 
for example. And allong with that you could keep track of how many 
times the person missed the question.
[ 1 "California"  "Sacramento"  1  1  0  1 ]

where the block above refers to  [ index Question  Answer  difficulty 
 Attempts Wrong Correct]

There's a lot more work to do this but if you can then search for 
the difficult questions, etc. Your program would control the order 
of the questions based on some filter such as difficulty, attempts. 
The user could just mark a question as difficult.

Anyway, just a thought.  I don't want to make your life hard and 
I need to go back to my own mess I started. I am in block-o-rama 
myself.

The one thing you do not seem able to change is the [ continuation 
char

use

    do read clipboard://

to input any number of lines

@Sunanda  I see! So the "[" character is simply a hint. Wouldn't 
it have been more intuitive to have used the "]" char - to indicate 
that an open '"[" needs to be closed?? I'm glad that the LISP REPL 
doesn't do this - not the ones that i use anyway :)) But thanks! 
 You've cleared things up a bit....

But, OTOH, if you really do want to write an expression like

1
+
2

in the interpreter console, you can use this trick:

do [
1
+
2
]

@Ladislav Thanks for clearing that up!  At the moment, I'm simply 
reading http://www.rebol.com/docs/words/wswitch.htmland trying out 
the snippets to do 2 things:
1. Learn to use the REBOL console
2. Learn REBOL syntax etc


Entering those multiline snippets is what was a problem - until now. 
The console prints a "[" after each CR. For a noob, this chars looks 
and feel just like the ones IN the code. :))

here's a cheap'n'cheerful console replacement that concatenates an 
expression until it reads a blank line. Then it executes it. (Two 
blank lines to exit).

Feel free to change the console prompt characters.

my-con: func [
  /local
   in-line
   in-buff
   err
][
forever [
    in-buff: copy ""
    in-line: copy ""
    forever [ 
      in-line: ask "In > "
      if in-line = "" [break]
      append in-buff join " " in-line
      ]
 if in-buff = "" [break]
 err: none
 if error? err: try [print ["Out > " do in-buff] true] [
    print ["Oops > " mold disarm err]
    ]
 ]
 exit
]

Duke - I think that in fact it is not much of an issue? How often 
do you use multiline expression in REBOL interactive console session? 
It does not allow you to go back anyway, so ...

@Ladislav  [quote]do read clipboard://[/quote]


I see! I'm on a Linux Xubuntu box - so I just highlight the text, 
and then right-click paste it into the REBOL console. I get to "see" 
the code, then the results, after a CR. Your method works OK, but 
all I get is the results -- don't seem like "a full meal deal" :)) 
Thanks ...

I just did a "Help type? at the console, and got:

TYPE? value /word


Does this output not seem counter-intuitive to you guys? Especially 
when the syntax is:

TYPE?/word/ value   ; I used the / char to indicate an option


This tells me that the type? word is followed by an optional refinement, 
but always needs a "value" - in that order. The console help output 
seems to have it reversed. What do you think?

So, why isn't it just the other way around, like in the help? You 
could in principle do that. It just gives you many more arguments 
that you would be forced to type.

TYPE? could look like this:

type? 5 word

So, if you didn't want the refinement, you would have to type:

type? 5 none


For functions with many arguments, you would have to type something 
like:

my-function 1 none none none none none none

which is no fun to type directly.

I personally consider refinements to be one of the less stellar parts 
of REBOL.


Henrik, do you prefer one additional function for each new way of 
calling a function, instead of refinements?

I still think that the REBOL Help sub-system should reflect EXACTLY 
how the function should be written

 - this is easy. If you find a better way how to display the help, 
 then simply propose it. In REBOL, it is easier to write the code, 
 than to invent what the code should do.

Aha, you tried to write something above. Well, I do not quite understand 
the stars you used - where should they be put?

I'm also working on very similar to your case right now. I don't 
know if its useful for you but here how I do (on Windows)


command: {csvde -u -f export.ldap -d "ou=myou" -r "(objectClass=user)" 
-s 10.1.31.2 -a "" "" -l "DN,sn,uid,l,givenName,telephoneNumber,mail"}

call/wait/console/shell/error command %export.err  ;export all users, 
bind annonymous

if 0 < get in info? %export.err 'size [print "error" editor %export.err 
halt]
lines: read/lines %export.ldap

;create an object from the first line (field names, order may differ 
from what you give in the batch)

ldap-object: construct append map-each v parse first content none 
[to-set-word v] 'none
foreach line lines [
	(
		set words-of o: make ldap-object []  parse/all line {,}
		append users: [] o
	)
] ;append all valid users as an object to a block
probe users

I hope it gives some idea.

; use following to have the functionality. I have a very long script 
and I don't want to put it inside a IF block
do-block: [ long long script ]

foreach a b [ if any [a = 3 a = 5 ...] do-block] ;continue on other 
values of a.