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[REBOL] Rebol Tech, please answer. Two questions. Re:(3)

From: joel:neely:fedex at: 13-Sep-2000 7:44

I think that there's a very practical pseudo-ergonomic reason why all of these "verbs" have their arguments in the order: take-action upon-this-thing with-these-other-things ... To use Petr's example of save %where what the overwhelmingly most likely (IMHO) case is that %where is a file or a word that references a file, and that the what expression can be arbitrarily more complex. (I.e., more likely than to have a complex expression that resolves to the file being written into, with a very simple expression for the data value.) Speaking for myself, about the most complex expression I normally use for the target of save or write is something resembling write to-file string-expression data-values whereas it's very common for me to have something of the form write %some-file complicated-expression-to-evaluate-... ...into-the-data-vaue(s)-to-be-written-to-the-file-... ...previously-named Given the absence of argument list delimiters, long involved expressions (and, hey! this is an Expression-Based language, right ;-) can require careful attention to layout/typography to be readable. This goal is enhanced by placing the shortest complete parts first. DISCLAIMERS: 1) I have no idea whether this was a deliberate choice in the design of REBOL. But it makes sense to me. 2) I'm well aware that our German friends (for example) a literature whose style long, sophisticated utterances with verbs deferred to the end includes have. So all of the above conjecturing very likely culturally influenced has been. Perhaps those of us whose native language American or British is a tendency toward attention deficit disorder have. -jn- [Petr--Krenzelok--trz--cz] wrote: