AltME groups: search

Gregg's response to the OSX widgets thread on the maling list suggests 
another possibility.

btw - what is the status of OS-X version? IIRC it was high on priority 
list and it is long time since View was released last time. Is that 
so big problem to not implement timers for OS-X in half a year or 
how long it is since View release? ;-)

Multiple refinement functions :  I need to formulate a function with 
more than one refinement.  I know in Rebol we usually use the word 
'either to formulate them, but with more than 3 refinements (and 
its following default case) it becomes tedious.   Structures like 
'record-operations: func [/delit /addit /modit] [ either  delit [print 
"delete"] [either addit [print "add"] [either modit [print "modify"][print 
"no refinement"]]]]'  are overly complicated.  I would like a more 
flat structure, to be able to distinguish the conditions which are 
independants from the ones mutually dependants, albeit mutually exclusive. 
 I tried multiple if's but that does not seem to work.  What are 
the good options to code multiple refinements functions.  The mail 
list does not seem to have an example discussing just that.  And 
in the source, most functions with multiple refinements are native.

ah, and I forgot - http://www.rebol.org- script archive, mail list 
archive

I'll pipe up again and say anybody.  Now, if you wanted to hire someone 
that could

write say, a new LIST-VIEW or a dataflow engine, then there may be 
screening

required.  But if you wanted usable applications, I think the sole 
requirement may be
'willingness'.

Why did I join this community? The primary reason is to be part of 
a small, smart and passionate group who think differently


That's basically the same reason I joined this community.  Like many 
others here I found REBOL through the Amiga community.  I had access 
to an Amiga 2000 when I was in elementary school and I loved it. 
 When I decided to start programming I played with some Perl, some 
VB, some C and then I signed up to the Amiga Developers List in 2001, 
through which I found this community and I've never looked back...

Since REBOL requires a programmer to 

think differently", in general what type of person, skill set, and/or 
background is required for a person to be a good REBOL programmer?"


  I think that those most likely to really grok REBOL are those that 
  "think outside of the box."  IMHO, anyone CAN be a good REBOL programer, 
  like Gregg says, what you need most is an open mind.  Curiosity does 
  help....  A lot.  There are a number of simple IQ tests that you 
  can give people to determine their ability to "think outside the 
  box."  The way they approach the problem is as important as their 
  ability to solve the problem because this shows you how they will 
  attempt to solve problems they encounter while programming.


Therefore, would a programmer with a computer science background 
with NON procedural languages like Lisp or ML be more likely to 
grok" and appreciate REBOL?"


From what I have seen, they will pick up REBOL a lot quicker than 
those without the background in lisp or a language like Lisp, however 
this doesn't necisarrily mean that they will be able to write the 
best REBOL code...

Would it make sense to 

hire" a young/new programmer out of college and get them involved 
with REBOL early so they have less "bad habits" to unlearn? Are any 
schools teaching their students REBOL?"


There is a group here, "Rebol School", that we have been using to 
discuss the topic of learning/teaching REBOL.  One of the users here, 
DenisMX, I believe has developed, or is at least working on developing 
a REBOL curriculum.

Why did I join the community? Because when I joined, REBOL was still 
pretty new.


R2 wasn't there yet - the first alphas for it came a few months after 
I started playing with the language. Most of the low-level behavior 
of the language was completely undocumented outside of RT, and they 
were still trying to position the language as easy to use, easy to 
learn, high level. It still looked like R1 - Scheme with a different 
syntax - but it was different.


A challenge. So I dug in. I tested every function, everything I could 
find out. I asked a lot of questions on the mailing list. If they 
weren't answered, I dug in further and figured it out myself. And 
I got into a lot of really interesting arguments with the people 
on the list, testing and probing the language until all of the undocumented 
stuff became clear.


Those early arguments became the low-level documentation of REBOL. 
And then came the books, and the community got bigger. I started 
using REBOL at work, even when it wasn't the language I was supposed 
to be using - code is easier to generate with REBOL than it is to 
write directly in other languages. More fun too. That's the hook: 
REBOL is fun.


There is a principle I read in a Heinlein essay years ago: The principle 
of Creative Laziness. He wrote about the guy who invented the automatic 
pilot, back in World War 2, because piloting back then was a big 
hassle and he was too lazy to do it. Instead of doing the drudge 
work he did the more interesting task of figuring out how to automate 
it. If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness is its 
father. Laziness is a virtue.


That's what dialecting is all about: Automating the drudge work and 
wrapping it in a nice little language because it's more fun than 
doing it manually. More efficient too, a lot of the time.


Do you know who REBOL appeals to the most? Engineers, scientists, 
hackers, analysts, problem solvers. People with opinions, people 
with enough of a twisted sense of humor, of the world, that they 
don't want to just sit still and accept the way that they are told 
the world is - they want to figure it out and remake it if necessary. 
Interesting people: REBOL's other hook.

Welcome to the cool kids' table!

Is there a list anywhere of what values are actually their expected 
values, and what values are seen as words, when inside a block? As 
in:


blk: [none 1 1.2 integer! [email-:-somewhere-:-net] #an-issue 127.0.0.1]
etc. etc.

If not, someone should make one such list!

Geomol, such a list cannot be made, if I understand you correctly.

Carl wants such a list for   form, mold, to string!,  format (but 
that's R3), add the serial form, score some points and help the beginners 
in one grand pdf-maker datatype file.  Not much to ask, is it John? 
 :)

I would be cool, if we could kick some of the new ones to make such 
a list. It would be a good learning experience.

I still think, it will be good to have a list of examples, so it 
can be actual seen, what all this means. You and I understand it, 
but does everyone else?

Can u tell me why we use datetype  unset!  in the func  list-dir 
 but not in the func  to-logic 
I.e.  why do we not have
   to logic!
return false when I pass in it an unset!
?

Or am I missing something here ?  Maybe I miss what is the diff between 
 'qwetr  being type set-word! and it not having a binding yet or 
my having sent
    unset 'qwetr

Is this like the  diff in other lang's between  nil_or_null and undefined_or_undeclared 
?

Say i have
   a: [ 1 b 2 ]

now 
   list-dir to-url a/2

a/2  ; b

; I see this as different from
   list-dir this-word_occurs _nowhere_in_this_context
   list-dir  this-word-has-no-binding-yet-in-this-context

to-logic a/2   ; this would be false
to-logic  a/qwetr   ; i don't know what to think
to-logic  qwetr    ; my question ( I thought ? )

; I did a dif between the functions in VIEW and those in CORE for 
a default install.  What I get is this ( I hope it is useful to have 
al 106  in one place )

 alert  brightness?  caret-to-offset  center-face  choose  clear-face 
  clear-fields  confine  crypt-strength?

 dbug  deflag-face  desktop  dh-compute-key  dh-generate-key  dh-make-key 
  do-events  do-face  do-face-alt  do-thru  

 draw  dsa-generate-key  dsa-make-key  dsa-make-signature  dsa-verify-signature 
  dump-face  dump-pane  edge-size?  

 editor  emailer  exists-thru?  find-key-face  find-window  flag-face 
  flag-face?  flash  focus  get-face  

 get-net-info  get-style  hide  hide-popup  hilight-all  hilight-text 
  hsv-to-rgb  in-window?  inform  

 insert-event-func  inside?  install  launch-thru  layout  link-relative-path 
  load-image  load-stock  

 load-stock-block  load-thru  local-request-file  make-face  notify 
  offset-to-caret  open-events  outside?  

 overlap?  path-thru  read-net  read-thru  remove-event-func  request 
  request-color  request-date  request-dir  

 request-download  request-file  request-list  request-pass  request-text 
  reset-face  resize-face  rgb-to-hsv  

 rsa-encrypt  rsa-generate-key  rsa-make-key  screen-offset?  scroll-drag 
  scroll-face  scroll-para  set-face  

 set-font  set-para  set-style  set-user  show  show-popup  size-text 
  span?  stylize  textinfo  unfocus  

 uninstall  unlight-text  unview  vbug  view  viewed?  win-offset? 
  within?

Robert  you can get a similar list by doing

then find in the list MDP-GUI-1-4-1.r all the files in the package

change xrefs are actually easy to generate because you don't have 
to list "free" objects

not on my list. maybe in the future.

otherwise, i'll end up with an infinite list of things to add.

notice that tables can be used for many things, for example to layout 
a numbered list, with the number in the first cell and the text in 
the second

classic example: you are doing a definition list with a table, so 
you have a column with words and a column with the description.

I'm looking for a definition-list example in the test document ...

it's not hard to render math. it's just that TeX is very well tuned 
(uses the correct spacing between things), which is just a long list 
of rules and parameters. One could get that out from the TeX source... 
otherwise it just takes a long time to tweak all the parameters to 
get a nice looking result.

the pdf reference documentation list all the characters in those 
fonts. you can download it from the adobe website.

i used db-cached-query for vid LISTs, gives a huge speedup without 
using too much memory. (i had a custom list style though that was 
optimized for this). i don't have a simple example at hand... :(

from here http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/hierarchical-data.html
I thing the adjacency list model would be a good solution, or is 
there something better withmysql 5 and stored procedures? or something 
in rebol?

will, that is a great article. It explains why the adjacency list 
model is not good enough b/c it's not normalized

wops, I actually meant the" the nested set model" would be a good 
solution, had to write way too much code to retrive, cache, etc with 
the adjacency list model. Still wondering if some good rebol fellow 
has code ready, something like the article but with stored procedures? 
Anything better? mmm, and what if I'd like geolocalization, should 
I buy a book about PostGIS? please tell me there is a easier way! 
thx ;-)

New MySQL release 1.2.0 beta : http://softinnov.org/tmp/mysql-protocol.r

o Changed behaviour and syntax of the 'read command :

	read mysql://[root-:-localhost]/
	==> return the list of databases

	read mysql://[root-:-localhost]/db
	==> return the list of tables in database "db"

	read mysql://[root-:-localhost]/db/tbl
	==> return the description of table "tbl" in database "db"

	read/custom mysql://[root-:-localhost]/db ["...sql query..."]

 ==> execute the sql query on database "db" and return the resultset.

James: sorry for the delay, still not found time for docs but her 
it is "as is.."  /debug is your friend, get started, load Dock driver 
, then load  http://reboot.ch/rebol/mysql-wrapper.txtthen:
;set a list of connections:
.db/databases: [
  ;local
  mydb1.local mysql://user:[password-:-127-:-0-:-0-:-1]/mydb1
  mydb2.local mysql://user:[password-:-127-:-0-:-0-:-1]/mydb2

  ;online
  mydb1 mysql://user:[password-:-127-:-0-:-0-:-1]:3307/mydb1
  mydb2 mysql://user:[password-:-127-:-0-:-0-:-1]:3307/mydb2
]
;use a db (if not open will open it automatically):	
.db/use 'mydb1

Doc, the read-packet function in mysql-protocol.r is missing one 
word in the /local list. Line 538:

Don't know, I think it doesn't support anything above 3.x but I can't 
find the full /Command feature list on rebol.com to confirm.

I pinged the server just fine. Here is the code:

REBOL []
#include do %mysql-protocol.r

results: read rejoin [mysql://mysqluser:[mypassword-:-mysite-:-com]:22/mydatabase 
["SELECT * FROM tablename"]


The MySQL server is on a hosted machine. In cpanel I added my IP 
address to the 'Remote MySQL' Remote Database Access Hosts list. 
I think you are right that I will need to access the database from 
the cgi because the hosting company will not allow direct access, 
even though its suppossedly allowed in cpanel.

Thanks for your help.


Are there any examples of accessing a MySQL database via CGI in Rebol? 
I just googled and found nothing.

After succesfull implementation of native affine transformations 
we are solving the rest of items on our 'to-do beta' list. I cannot 
tell you more for now but stay tuned. I believe the beta release 
of View/AGG will be very soon.

is there public info on the to-do beta list ?

This is internal list but maybe you can ask Carl about more information. 
(try it in Blog chat channel?)

The need for a good IDE has been high on my "thought list" these 
days.

javascript:readpanel()

   -->  Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property 
   Location.host
javascript: readpanel()

  -->  Error: panel is not defined  Source File: file:///d:/Anton/Dev/Rebol/View/list-demos/Micha's-javascript-page.html 
   Line: 26

Completely different.  I think we discussed www.curl.com on the mailing 
list many years ago.  Someone was saying that they had a proposition 
for View to do a job, but it ended up being done by Curl.

Anyone know a list of web anonymisers that I can try ? All the ones 
I've tried have failed to connect from here in Australia.

what you'd do in your case is have a template with everything in, 
and the code selects what to show. from the point of view of the 
code, you just have abstract entities ("login form", "list of accounts", 
"list of messages" and so on) and you habdle that. how they are implemented 
in HTML is not something you need to worry about, except in some 
rare cases or when you are in a hurry and do QAD things ;)

folks did very nice system called billingo - you could rent it for 
very few bucks even for cz folks to afford, you defined your price-list, 
data-limits etc. logic and then even your secretary could add new 
person to the network ;-) Such person had portal sub-page available 
to log into, to see its traffic, graphs etc. It did also invoices 
for you. Very nice. Today they announced they are closing, because 
of low demand for such service. But it was excellent service, which 
would save me plenty of time ....

<pre> literally means "as written" -- if there are no line breaks 
in the text, then there will be none on the page.
***

Some lines in <pre> tags can be accidently enormously long, and need 
to be wrapped by hand.

That's one reason REBOL.org offers you a user-setting for the point 
at which you want Mailing list messages to be forcibly wrapped:
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/cpt-update-profile.r

(See Appearance and settings / Point at which Mailing List Archive 
messages will start to wrap.)

Due to a very slow Internet connection, I need to make the FTP module 
of my website builder script more efficient so I don't send files 
unnecessarily. What I have in mind is:


1. Delete all the files in the website directory on my harddrive 
to eliminate all unused files.
2. Build the website to the website directory on my harddrive.

3. Download a list of the file names and creation dates from the 
website (all are in one directory).

4. Read the list of file names and creation dates from the directory 
on my harddrive (all are in the one directory mentioned in 2 above).

5. If a file is on the hard drive but not on the server, send it 
to the server.

6. If a file is on the server but not on the harddrive, delete the 
file on the server.

7. If a file on the harddrive is newer than a file on the server, 
send it to the server.


Has anyone already done this? Am I forgetting anything? Any pointers 
on how to do this?

Should > be in the list of escaped chars? It doesn't look like it 
from the spec. I'll have to check my notes to see if that was added 
for a specific reason.

I don't think the method Doc provided will work for dynamically generated 
pages.  For dynamic content  you will need to use something like
	checksum http://www.rebol.com

However, you will need to maintain a list of the last time a page 
was checked.

If you can get to them from the root, then they are fair game, unless


.....they have a rel=nofollow......We have that on a few simply because 
they duplicate content (eg viewing a script, viewing a script in 
color, downloading a script


....Mailing list -- best to index either the individual posts (http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-message.r) 
or the complete threads (http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r) 
but not both.


....you may get a __lot__ of duplication when spidering the AltME 
archive as every post has a URL, but we display in batches of 50.....So 
perhaps only spider URLs like
http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-posts.r?post=r3wp291xNNNN
when NNNN is 1, 51, 101, 151, etc....


....I think You already have indexed the ML as on REBOL.,net and 
Carl's latest 300 AltME messages, eg
   http://mail.rebol.net/cgi-bin/mail-list.r?msg=45305
   http://host4.altme.com/altweb/rebol3/chat771.html

It would be better _not_ to have index those; it just creates duplicates 
once you have indexed the equivalents on REBOL.org (especially as 
the AltMe last 300 goes out of date so quickly).

Tell me what is unclear there!

I've already indexed the mailing list on rebol.net so I guess I should 
avoid ml-display-thread.r and display-message.r

I recently used Kompozer to build a quick site to fix a friend's 
site that was so bad I figured I could at least spend a few hours 
and take it from a 1 to a 6 (scale one to ten).

There are a few variations of Kompozer.  But Kompozer is the best 
of them.


It still sucks though.  When you do view source it does not put your 
cursor where you expect it to.  It is nightmarish to figure out how 
to edit tables. 
But, over all, if you keep things simple, it works well enough.

mobile browsing expected to outpace desktop access in 3-5 years.

Most of the world lives on their cell phones.


As to JavaScript Frameworks to fix the biggest human fail in computer 
history (that being that we use HTML+JavaScript to build UserInterface), 
having headed the creation of a complete UI system that is delivered 
through the web, I will say the following:


- Find something that handles Tables (grids, lists) well.  Make sure 
it does verything you need.

- Make a list for yourself of widgets you care about, and confirm 
(assume nothing) about the level of detail with which they operate. 
 For example, Imagine 3 radio buttons, on the web they have no default 
state, and some interfaces allow them to operate like checkboxes, 
not radio buttons.  Again, assume nothing!

- Confirm, for yourself, they work on the platforms you care about. 
 Nothing works on everything, even when they claim it.


I did not want to build Quilt, but we still don't know anything that 
comes close other than Tibco's crap, and I'm not sure they even sell 
it anymore. (I recall it was like $100K).

Mailing List Archive tagging project has reached a major milestone:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-display-message.r?m=rmlWJKC

A UPnP pilot is on the library here : http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=upnp-igd.r


Run it and you will discover all your UPnP device on your lan if 
any (lan printer, internet gateway and other lan equipement). It 
will also list your port mapping on your internet gatway if any. 
To run it, if needed, open your firewall for UPnP connection.


The objective is to help anyone how wants to develope and run server 
on their PC with an automatic port mapping for incomming connection.


For example, if  AltMe embed this tool, running a world on my PC 
would be more simple as no more NAT configuration is needed to route 
incoming connnection.

I need some advice. I try to encap very small and easy script. One 
of the first lines is list: read https://user:[pass-:-url-here] ... while 
it works from rebcmd in sdk/tools directory, it does not work when 
encapped in encmd, statin "invalid port specs". Why?

Wonder why this returns an empty set


list-reg/HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts"

keys: list-reg/HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts"
    probe keys

    keys: get-reg/HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts" 
    "URW Palladio L Italic (TrueType)"
    probe keys

    keys: exists-reg?/HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts\URW 
    Palladio L Italic (TrueType)" 
    probe keys

produces this

[]
URWPA32_0.TTF
false

think it should be
[ ... list of fonts .. ]
URWPA32_0.TTF
true

Trying to see if .net is installed but this gives me an empty block 


 foreach key keys: list-reg/HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet 
 Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform" [
                print key
 ]

even though I can see it full of keys in the registry ...

I'll put it on my to-do list. I'm caught up up through 1993 now. 


The biggest pain with reshacker is version info. I couldn't get it 
to work with version resources as quickly as I wanted so I cheated 
and pump keystrokes to it.

Not that I know of. Figuring out how to trigger the UAC prompt is 
on the list of things to do for the new installer though.

should clear-text be generalised to also clear the rows of a text-list 
and table ?

one question - will there be better list/grid support? My rebol friend 
would use rebgui immediatelly, but is smiling and saying - those 
ppl don't design db releated apps? Wow can they live without multi-column 
text list or proper grid? :-)

there is multicolumn list now.

is there a multicolumn text list? Btw - why Carl did not check-in 
his updated and better list style as from VID 1.3 older IOS initiative 
for 1.3?

hmm, still the same issues - how they will be adressed? I know that 
event/focus system is not all that easy to change - but drop lists 
still work in non-system friendly manner - can't close it clicking 
away or pressing escape .... text-list does not allow multirow sellection 
(or it is part of its options?) I will better look into docs to stop 
asking what is maybe obvious :-)

Table and multi-column text-list are one and the same. Not involved 
in the VID 1.3 work so can't answer that.

can I have visual cell dividers? I mean - some styling istead of 
flat white design? It is list after all, so I will have to play with 
it ...

as for text-list multi-selection - dunno if I was understood incorrectly, 
or it was my fault to provide you with not so accurate description 
of how multi-selection with shift works .... however - it should 
be easy for you to check - just start Explorer and play with shift 
multi-selection ...

Is there an updated list of the outstanding issues?

Note the following user-configurable blocks under ctx-rebgui/edit:

	tabbed: [area field edit-list password button]

	hilight-on-focus: [field edit-list]

	caret-on-focus: [area field edit-list password]

	action-on-enter: [field edit-list password]


But its probably a good idea to agree on the "correct" default behaviour 
anyway.

Can i ask anybody: is anyone working on a witget GRID (or similar 
- for example: text-list with more(multi) columns)?

.. and function "picked" like text-list..

but widget text-list in rebGUI doesn't have multi-columns..

I made some improvements in the list-view widget for rebgui  ^^ Now 
dynamc widget changes impact on data to be drawn (so when you change 
the state of a checkbox this impacts on the stored data) I make a 
generic callback funtion to allow ppl to save list data into a file 
 on changes. I make some estetical changes too 
I hope you will apreciate it  ^^

0.52 version of list-view widget is shapped to ork with Rebgui 0.36

list-view 0.52 works fine with rebgui 0.37

List view is  thinked like a rendering engine you give to it a stutured 
list of datas then you get it on screen

I give a very simple sample of this in the list-view052.r script

but thing like remove list-view-var1/buffer  list -view-var1/picked 
 show list-view-var1  can be handeled easyly  ...

This very odd .. I have a drop-list .. and the contents of the data 
change each time I drop the list down.  It doesn't happen in Ashley's 
example tour.r, and I don't have an action associated with the drop-list.

edit-list does not display past the border of a drop-list.

would be nice to have in the options list, a way to set the background 
colour for the slider.

i'm going to send out some emails to define some details, finally 
we have a list of options for the banquet so that you can chose your 
preferred meal.

or? when comparing strings, 0 is the most probable results, for all 
chars except list. makes a good default.

list -> last

I've done it dozens of times during my testing. I should really put 
together a list of rebcode sequences that can crash REBOL.

Here are some initial comments on the recently posted rebcode documentation 
draft:

- It has been suggested on the list that since the assembler's rewrite 
engine is a mezzanine, it might not be included in the final version, 
in favor of (to promote?) user-made rewrite engines. If not, you 
would need to change the documentation to match, especially section 
1.4.

- It needs to be made clear somewhere in the initial description 
of the rebcode dialect that rebcode is a statement-based language, 
not an expression-based language like the do dialect. Opcodes perform 
actions, but don't return anything per-se. The 2.1 or 2.3 sections 
would be a good place for this explanation to be.

- In the "Branches are always relative" note at the end of 2.6, there 
is a sentence "The branches are always relative to the current block." 
that could be removed. The whole note should probably be renamed 
to "Branches are always local" because the note doesn't really cover 
that they are also relative. Also the phrase "use a branch opcode 
to" could be replaced with "branch to" and be less awkward.

- A common mistake in specifying literal branch offsets is to miscalculate 
what location the offsets are relative to. This mistake would be 
less likely if the third paragraph of 2.8 were changed to "The argument 
to the branch opcodes is an integer value, representing how much 
of an offset you want the branch to perform. Branch offsets are always 
relative to the location after the branch statement, not the absolute 
offset within the block. Positive values branch forward; negative, 
backward. The branch target must always fall within the current code 
block." as this is the actual branch behavior (and more clear).

- The sentence in 2.8 "The brab opcode allows computed branch offsets 
to be created." isn't really true right now, at least in any practical 
way. The current behavior is more like "The brab opcode allows you 
to branch to an offset selected at runtime by an index.".

- The paragraph at the end of 2.8 "There is also a special case of 
operation. If the block argument to BRAB is an integer (created from 
a label), then the branch is made to that relative location plus 
the value of the index argument." would be a good idea to be implemented 
(I've submitted it to RAMBO), but is rather awkwardly phrased. This 
could be rephrased once the behavior is implemented, or left alone 
if you don't want most rebcode users to use this behavior.

- In section 2.9, the sentence "Result then refers to the value returned 
from the function." may be better said as "The word result is then 
assigned the value returned from the function.".

- 4.1.*: The phrasing of many of these entries is awkward. Also, 
remember that opcodes don't return anything, they modify operands.

- 4.1.1: I'm not sure "integral" means "the integer part of" as it 
is used here; the word may be more related to integrate than integer.

- 4.1.4: Lowercase the "Tail" word to be consistent. Otherwise, well 
phrased.

- 4.1.5: The descriptions of change, copy and insert don't describe 
how their amount parameter is used. You could describe change as 
"Changes part of a series at the current position to that part of 
a value (-1 for the whole value).", copy as "Set the operand to a 
partial copy of the series (-1 for all) from the current position.", 
and insert as "Inserts part of one series (-1 for all) into another 
at the current position.". Or, you could provide further explanation 
in some new 2.* section.

- 4.1.6: In the description of index?, change "Returns the" to "Set 
the operand to".

- 4.1.7: Does not reflect the renaming of the opcode get to getw 
and the addition of setw. Also, instances of "Result modified" should 
be changed to "Set result" or "Set operand to result".
- 4.3.3: The braw opcode has been removed.

As I'm interested only in pure vectors, REBOL speed is succifient 
for me :)) But yes, REBOL can probably be linked to some external 
library (as Cyphre did with OpenGL) or SDL maybe? But I don't think 
it should be high on priority list, other things are more important.

i add this to my to-do list

label start
pickz op-code memory adress
brab [          ;list of opcode
	...
             ...
             LD_A_B
            ... 
] op-code
label LD_A_B set.i _a _b bra start

Steeve <BTW, why rebcode thread is not on rebol.net ?>

Technically, it is because the group's description does not have 
"[web-pubiic]" in it.....Add that text to the description, and the 
last 300 messages will be on REBOL.net in around 10 minutes.
***

I suspect no one did that either for the reason BrianH suggests, 
or because no one has thought to do it.

I don't see any reason why it should not be a [web-public] group, 
but I'll leave the changing of the group description to the active 
participants. (hint: right-click the group name in the left-hand 
side list of groups)

Marketing Ideas to lawyers
AN ARTICLE FROM SUNDAY'S NEW YORK TIMES WE SHOULD READ CAREFULLY.


Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software

By JASON PONTIN
Published: January 28, 2007

BJARNE STROUSTRUP, the designer of C++, the most influential programming 
language of the last 25 years, has said that “our technological civilization 
depends on software.” True, but most software isn’t much good. Too 
many programs are ugly: inelegant, unreliable and not very useful. 
Software that satisfies and delights is as rare as a phoenix.

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Sergei Remezov/Reuters

Charles Simonyi, chief executive of Intentional Software, in training 
for his trip to the International Space Station, scheduled for April.

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All this does more than frustrate computer users. Bad software is 
terrible for business and the economy. Software failures cost $59.5 
billion a year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology 
concluded in a 2002 study, and fully 25 percent of commercial software 
projects are abandoned before completion. Of projects that are finished, 
75 percent ship late or over budget.


The reasons aren’t hard to divine. Programmers don’t know what a 
computer user wants because they spend their days interacting with 
machines. They hunch over keyboards, pecking out individual lines 
of code in esoteric programming languages, like medieval monks laboring 
over illustrated manuscripts.


Worse, programs today contain millions of lines of code, and programmers 
are fallible like all other humans: there are, on average, 100 to 
150 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, according to a 1994 study by the 
Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. No 
wonder so much software is so bad: programmers are drowning in ignorance, 
complexity and error.


Charles Simonyi, the chief executive of Intentional Software, a start-up 
in Bellevue, Wash., believes that there is another way. He wants 
to overthrow conventional coding for something he calls “intentional 
programming,” in which programmers would talk to machines as little 
as possible. Instead, they would concentrate on capturing the intentions 
of computer users.


Mr. Simonyi, the former chief architect of Microsoft, is arguably 
the most successful pure programmer in the world, with a personal 
fortune that Forbes magazine estimates at $1 billion. There may be 
richer programmer-billionaires — Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry 
Page of Google come to mind — but they became rich by founding and 
managing technology ventures; Mr. Simonyi rose mainly by writing 
code.


He designed Microsoft’s most successful applications, Word and Excel, 
and he devised the programming method that the company’s software 
developers have used for the last quarter-century. Mr. Simonyi, 58, 
was important before he joined Microsoft in 1981, too. He belongs 
to the fabled generation of supergeeks who invented personal computing 
at Xerox PARC in the 1970s: there, he wrote the first modern application, 
a word processor called Bravo that displayed text on a computer screen 
as it would appear when printed on page.


Even at leisure, Mr. Simonyi, who was born in Hungary and taught 
himself programming by punching machine code on Russian mainframes, 
is a restless, expansive personality. In April, he will become the 
fifth space tourist, paying $20 million to board a Russian Soyuz 
rocket and visit the International Space Station.


Mr. Simonyi says he is not disgusted with big, bloated, buggy programs 
like Word and Excel. But he acknowledges that he is disappointed 
that we have been unable to use “our incredible computational ability” 
to address efficiently “our practical computational problems.”


“Software is truly the bottleneck in the high-tech horn of plenty,” 
he said.


Mr. Simonyi began thinking about a new method for creating software 
in the mid-1990s, while he was still at Microsoft. But his ideas 
were so at odds with .Net, the software environment that Microsoft 
was building then, that he left the company in 2002 to found Intentional 
Software.


“It was impractical, when Microsoft was making tremendous strides 
with .Net, to send somebody out from the same organization who says, 
‘What if you did things in this other, more disruptive way?’ ” he 
said in the January issue of Technology Review.


For once, that overfavored word — “disruptive” — is apt; intentional 
programming is disruptive. It would automate much of software development.


The method begins with the intentions of the people inside an organization 
who know what a program should do. Mr. Simonyi calls these people 
“domain experts,” and he expects them to work with programmers to 
list all the concepts the software must possess.


The concepts are then translated into a higher-level representation 
of the software’s functions called the domain code, using a tool 
called the domain workbench.


At two conferences last fall, Intentional Software amazed software 
developers by demonstrating how the workbench could project the intentions 
of domain experts into a wonderful variety of forms. Using the workbench, 
domain experts and programmers can imagine the program however they 
want: as something akin to a PowerPoint presentation, as a flow chart, 
as a sketch of what they want the actual user screen to look like, 
or in the formal logic that computer scientists love.


Thus, programmers and domain experts can fiddle with whatever projections 
they prefer, editing and re-editing until both parties are happy. 
Only then is the resulting domain code fed to another program called 
a generator that manufactures the actual target code that a computer 
can compile and run. If the software still doesn’t do what its users 
want, the programmers can blithely discard the target code and resume 
working on the domain workbench with the domain experts.


As an idea, intentional programming is similar to the word processor 
that Mr. Simonyi developed at PARC. In the jargon of programming, 
Bravo was Wysiwyg — an acronym, pronounced WIZ-e-wig, for “what you 
see is what you get.” Intentional programming also allows computer 
users to see and change what they are getting.


“Programming is very complicated,” Mr. Simonyi said. “Computer languages 
are really computer-oriented. But we can make it possible for domain 
experts to provide domain information in their own terms which then 
directly contributes to the production of the software.”


Intentional programming has three great advantages: The people who 
design a program are the ones who understand the task that needs 
to be automated; that design can be manipulated simply and directly, 
rather than by rewriting arcane computer code; and human programmers 
do not generate the final software code, thus reducing bugs and other 
errors.


NOT everyone believes in the promise of intentional programming. 
There are three common objections.


The first is theoretical: it is based on the belief that human intention 
cannot, in principle, be captured (or, less metaphysically, that 
computer users don’t know what people want).


The second is practical: to programmers, the intentional method constitutes 
an “abstraction” of the underlying target code. But most programmers 
believe that abstractions “leak” — that is, they fail to perfectly 
represent the thing they are meant to be abstracting, which means 
software developers must sink their hands into the code anyway.


The final objection is cynical: Mr. Simonyi has been working on intentional 
programming for many years; only two companies, bound to silence 
by nondisclosure agreements, acknowledge experimenting with the domain 
workbench and generator. Thus, no one knows if intentional programming 
works.


Sheltered by Mr. Simonyi’s wealth, Intentional Software seems in 
no hurry to release an imperfect product. But it is addressing real 
and pressing problems, and Mr. Simonyi’s approach is thrillingly 
innovative.


If intentional programming does what its inventor says, we may have 
something we have seldom enjoyed as computer users: software that 
makes us glad.


Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, 
a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: [pontin-:-nytimes-:-com].

Your life "IS" longer, and better, way better.

The top 10 things that might have killed you 100 years ago are not 
even on the list today.

actually there is no relation. a macro is some code that is executed 
a compile time, and returns some other code (that is then compiled). 
basically, before compiling, lisp expands macros, like the C preprocessor 
expands text macros (of course, since lisp macros work at the list 
level instead of the text level, they are more powerful).

Jaime, I appreciate your posts on this subject. I still have Scheme 
high on my list of languages to check out. I also regard Gabriele's 
points highly.

Brian, I have not look into Icon, but I can put in my list of fringe 
languages to check ;-)

Jaime, (f a b) *must* be quoted or be in a quoted list (maybe using 
the "funny" way of quoting available for macros ;) for it not being 
a function call.

(f a b) *must* be quoted or be in a quoted list (maybe using the 

funny" way of quoting available for macros ;) for it not being a 
function call." This is simply not true. Not with syntax-case macros. 
You need to know that Scheme Macro system is different and a lot 
better than the one used by lisp as pointed by the article.

Cool list.

net-utils/net-log join "Type: " type: any [
	    all [new-dir? 'new-dir] 
	    all [new? 'new] 
	    all [dir-read? port 'dir] 

     all [port/state/flags and system/standard/port-flags/open-append 
     <> 0 'app] 
	    'file
	] 
	do select [
	    file [

  confirm-cmd port either port/algorithm = 'nlst [nlst-check] [list-check] 
		accept-connect port type 
		parse-dir-list port 
		if tmp: select locals/dir-cache to-file port/target [
		    port/status: first tmp 
		    port/date: third tmp 

      if any [none? port/size: second tmp 1024 > port/size] [port/size: 
      0]
		] 
		data-connect port 
		confirm-cmd port binary-type-check 
		if 0 < cmd-port/state/index: port/state/index [
		    confirm-cmd port restart-check
		] 
		confirm-cmd port read-check
	    ] 
	    new [confirm-cmd port write-check] 
	    new-dir [confirm-cmd port mkdir-check] 

     dir [confirm-cmd port either port/algorithm = 'nlst [nlst-check] 
     [list-check]] 
	    app [confirm-cmd port append-check]
	] type 
	accept-connect port type 
	if type = 'dir [
	    port/size: port/state/tail: parse-dir-list port
	]
    ] 
    port
]
close: func [port /local cmd-port cache-size][
    cmd-port: port/locals/cmd-port 
    if not dir-read? port [error-try? [confirm-transfer port]] 

    net-utils/net-log reform ["Caching cmd-port" cmd-port/host cmd-port/local-port 
    cmd-port/remote-port] 
    cmd-port/host: cmd-port/locals/tuple

I'd like to know if any of you want to be alpha testers for the up 
and comming version, which is a result of several YEARS of fine tuning, 
 and now combining, a rich set tools.

CURRENT FEATURES (partial list):
General:
-----------------------
-non intrusive, does not force any programing onto you.

    ex:  * no need to have version in header, and can still do version 
    control

           * history format is user specified, massive configurability
-encapped (windows) application, so its easy to use.

-no external dependencies (ex: zip archive is embeded, and coded 
in rebol :-)


Automated:
-----------------------
-script versioning
-file backup (versioned)
-zip archival
-file management

-creation of "packages" (create dirs, copy files, archive, prebol, 
slim-link, encap, etc)

-header manipulation (including history, date, version, and any field 
you want to enforce)
-system calls
-file parsing, replacing info tags.

Flexible setup:
-------------------------
-cascading configuration (global, user, project, + per file)

-config locking, prevents overiding configs in cascaded setups (project 
manager can create rules which no one can break)
-command-line arguments overides for many configs

-user set configs for most if not all features (ex: history format, 
date format).

and much more