[REBOL] Re: On mutability and sameness
From: robbo1mark:aol at: 21-Jun-2001 5:27
JOEL,
The point is that Ladislave, yourself & others debated at length, trying to use only
REBOL and a natural language ( English ) to demonstrate the differences in property &
behaviour of SAME? & EQUAL? functions.
Using REBOL was insufficient in producing a function for testing whether an any-string!
or any-block! value shared the same memory location, and natural language was to ambiguous
and lead to discussions about concise definitions & meanings for words.
Your use of C, whilst admittedly not making it clear to everyone, showed demonstrably
the why & how of the different behaviour. Anyone who knows C could study your example
and see the logic that produced the REBOL like behaviour. This lead me to a quicker and
more precise understanding than the previous "higher level" attempts at explanation did.
It depends on what your goals are, my goal was understanding the behaviour, perhaps Ladislav
& yourself are looking to "describe" the behaviour more CONCISELY.
The use of C helped my understanding, but whether it aided your attempts at CONCISE explanation,
that is for you and others to decide, all I can say is you helped me
to clarify my understanding and I thank you for that.
With regards to REBOL being open source, it isn't and I accepted that a long time ago
too! It's a shame it isn't because that would help me further my understanding enormously
being able to study the sources, but it's NOT and so I & others have to formulate our
own model of understanding & possible implemetation, which is *FUN*, so that is what
I do, if I can learn & share from and with the help others, great! hopefully we all benefit
from the process.
I love REBOL and will continue to use it and learn from it, it is a wonderful productivity
tool, that doesn't mean I accept proprietary technology as a good thing or think that
the implications & consequences of it are desirable, IMHO they're not, but I won't expound
that view here. All I will say is how advanced would our understanding of modern science
be if the discoveries of Newton, Einstein, Planck, Maxwell etc. were proprietary & secret?
Thank you for helping me further my understanding.
Mark Dickson
In a message dated Wed, 20 Jun 2001 4:18:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Joel Neely <[joel--neely--fedex--com]>
writes:
<< Hello, all!
[Robbo1Mark--aol--com] wrote:
> You cannot yet completely implement ALL of REBOL in REBOL
> but with a C Compiler ...
> ... you CAN safely drop down to that level if need be. YOU
> did so to prove a point about equality and sameness!
>
I knew better at the time, but haste overruled common sense.
I hereby apologize to one and all for using the "c" word.
If I promise never to do it again, will you let me forget
that I did so? ;-)
-jn-
--
It's turtles all the way down!
joel'dot'neely'at'fedex'dot'com
