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[REBOL] Re: [data type conversion] question

From: gerardcote:sympatico:ca at: 28-Mar-2004 16:21

Hi Maxim, Thanks for your prompt answer !
> the real thing is ... do you really need to put things in the block form... in this case, I'm pretty sure the answer is no.
You're right but it was only a question - I thought that may be REBOL would let the programmer escape the normal way of doing things when necessary and even specify other characters ("") to use as a replacement for the normal REBOL block delimiters [ ] for enclosing the full expression to parse. Something like in the following: input-expr: [9/5 * 100 + 32] parse/no-block-eval input-expr rules or parse/block-to-string input-expr rules or any other suggestion ... in fact In my view it would a bit different from the current parse/all refinement where we can specify other delimiters for the splitting of tokens when scanning the input expression. Here it looks more like a simple cosmetic addition but it would have the effect of being able to specify the input expression from a REBOL block (which is so natural) instead of using a string. The first natural way I could see it is to ask PARSE to not take into account its normal eval mode so it could nom more complain when encountering ill-formed datatypes. The simplest way to let PARSE do this would be to ask him to internally replace the ending [] by "" and continue its normal life using all its current knowledge. No more frills. Even simpler would be to let him automatically detect the presence of [] instead of "" but as I suppose some scripts already take the normal REBOL way of doing things into account and use it in their own way - it would not be very safe to do this, be it only for compatibility reason. After all this is simply a cosmetic suggestion to let PARSE be itself more REBOLish in some way, that is even for just being able to cope with this kind of expression - at least this is my own view of the subject and I know PARSE can be modified relatively easily by Carl it this is really needed. It's also suggested here more for discussion of the global impacts on adding such a mechanism for PARSE and may be suggest the better way to handle this if PARSE had to be changed to handle this situation in a future release. Consider this to be on my personal wish list and asking others their POV on the question! Regards, Gerard