[REBOL] Re: link to background on Rebol language design?
From: greggirwin:mindspring at: 19-Aug-2003 12:42
Hi Bryan,
>> I think Carl has said that his study of denotational semantics
>> played a big part as well.
b> Yeah, that was specifically that I was thinking about, I seem to
b> remember reading that in Dr. Dobbs, I was hoping there was a link to
b> something deep on that as it applies to Rebol, as I recall what I read
b> that one time had also some discussion of dialecting, and the reason for
b> calling what might be called a variable in another language, a word in
b> Rebol.
Forth uses the term "word". I think that's where REBOL got it.
Something REBOL has done for me--in a big way--is to inspire me to
read more bout other languages again, to see what it is that makes
REBOL so special; what made it grab me. By reinvestigating Lisp, Logo,
and Forth (among others) with my newfound REBOL perspective, I've seen
them in a new light and gotten a lot more out of studying them. I
should thank Carl for that as much as for REBOL itself.
The whole point of Forth was that you didn't write programs in Forth
you wrote vocabularies in Forth. When you devised an application you
wrote a hundred words or so that discussed the application and you
used those hundred words to write a one line definition to solve the
application. It is not easy to find those hundred words, but they
exist, they always exist.
-- Chuck Moore, creator of Forth
-- Gregg
