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[REBOL] Re: Update: Read *and* Write images against Windows Clipboard

From: gscottjones:mchsi at: 22-Sep-2002 19:13

From: "G. Scott Jones
> << Of course, answers beget more questions...>>
From: "Gregg Irwin"
> Ask away. Sometimes the best way for me to learn things > to is answer questions. Not that I'll necessarily be *able* > to answer your questions but... :)
Hi, Gregg, You are a brave person, but you should feel no particular obligation to answer, of course. I've already partially answered some: 1) IPC ??? When I plugged this into google, I ended up at the organization IPC started in 1957 as the Institute for Printed Circuits, that became Institute of Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits, and then became IPC in 1999 but without acronymic meaning this time. (Funny how circular life can be sometimes :-). Sensing an understandable wrong turn by google, I checked around some more, and surprisingly was turning up nothing that seemed communication related. Using my fine, intuitive mind, I "made up" an anticipated acronym of "inter process communication", and was then only off by a small hyphen. Not bad. However, I saw lots of talk about "it" but no substance. Deciding that this is no dot.not marketing thing, I decided I would search more throroughly later. If you already know of a link to a single, concise over-view, that would be of help, but please don't waste your time looking for it! :-) 2) ARexx Figuring that this was probably not the uncle of T Rex, I was more quickly successful with google and discovered that it is an Amiga Thang, almost as if it were a contraction of "Amiga" and "Rexx" or something. With the wonderful, glowing terms in which I saw it described, I really came to regret not having more money in 1984 and buying that dang Amiga whose specs I drooled over. But having another year of medical school left before I would start earning my $3 an hour that would earn as a resident in training, my finances said otherwise. My TI994A would have to last another two years, through a rejected Apple loan saying I was a student (no kidding?), up to the incredible excitement generated by Windows 1.0 !!!! Generous in-laws finally floated a loan to buy my first non-toy PC. But ... I seem to have digressed. (Wow, that Windows 1.0 was something else, literally ... sucka!). OK, so reading quickly between the lines, it sounds like the Amiga was blessed with an advanced scripting language that could listen on a port and be passed stuff. Cool ... really makes me appreciate learning the finer points of line numbering methods in gwbasic. But again I digress. Looking at the list, I saw numerous references to Arexx (I'm beginning to suspect that there may, ... just may be some link between Amiga and REBOL and loyal fans. <humor alert> Hmmm, another day's research. </humor alert>). 3) When I was pondering my alternative, cross-platform server with which I could set up my own inter-process communication with REBOL, I began to entertain what would the best language and/or scheme look like. Petr had once said he envisioned printer support as looking like a scheme, but I was unable to get a vision of what this would look like. I was seeing, for my own home-grown IPC, something more like a query language dialect, like SQL (not SQL, just similar ;-). I could see that a photographic support back-end might also use a query language. What I quickly began to appreciate is that I could easily be starting on a process of reinventing the wheel (hmm, let me see, PI = 3.1.....). That was just about the time that other matters became very pressing in my life, so "everything" was shelved (including the font stuff you generously sent me). I guess if there is a question in here, it would be what do those who are formally trained in this area see, in an overview sort of way, as the way REBOL might communicate with this resource-rich server. Maybe this *is* what the IPC thing is all about, which I will eventually discover once I do more research. If this answer is immediately obvious to you or a list member, it would be wonderful to learn more. It would also be great to not reinvent the wheel and use a method that is generic enough to grow. 4) Finally, and this is more of a question to myself, I wonder whether it wouldn't be better to take the approach you are taking, and bravely go through the Windows interface and avoid additional "kruft" (I like clean, simple things, including installations). There are other questions (there always are, but hey, maybe I should be more bandwidth conscious), but I'm ready to go make some dinner. (Yes, that was my stomach that was growling just a few minutes ago.) :-) --Scott Jones