[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