[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