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[REBOL] Re: [Bot] email command Bot

From: maarten:vrijheid at: 26-Mar-2004 11:49

Hi Mauro,
> I have been developing a Bot that can receive emails on a specified email > address with a particular format, execute the commands and then answer > back the results. > I mainly thought it as where I work now I have not access to the web but > only to the corporate email address, but I wanted to be able to monitor > some things on my computer at home, and eventually, being able to make it > send me web pages through email.
Sounds cool.
> I have lately seen that someone has uploaded a similar project on the > rebol.org library. > My code is far from being finished and, most of all, being in a neat form > to be made public. > Moreover, I am still working (quite slowly, I admit it) on the logging > feature that would allow me to create nice reports of all the info about > the requests sent to the Bot during time.
I am afraid I am interested in the finished part, if it supports IMAP.
> I would like to know if someone is interested in this project. I am quite > happy to send the code to anyone who would like to help me. The code is > OOP, that is the bot is a object with methods as is the logger. I would > like to add XML logging to it to be able to easily extract data later. > > [small rant] > I am not a Rebol genius, though I have been using it (discontinued) for > some time now. There are still many things I have problems to understand, > mainly due to its "compactness" in the syntax, which I though it was a > thing the language wanted to avoid. See those neat examples in the library > to see what I mean. No doubts they are nice pieces of code that run well, > but they are quite ermetic (cryptic syntax)and often use some undocumented > parts of the language (like the use of internal ports, sub-ports, system > objects etc...) which make them quite "mysterious".
It's a different problem, really. REBOL allows access to *all* of itself. So you get to see and manipulate *everything*. Some of us have gone down that road, exploring a lots of mechanisms that would be internal to other interpreters. What I am trying to say is that it is not reasonable to expect all parts of REBOL to be documented, simply because some parts are visible but essentially internal. The fact that some gurus have figured them out is a great accomplishment that results in nice libraries, but not something you should necessarily want to do yourself. It's one of the joys of having a fully accessible (reflexive) language.
> I think this is the first problem novices meet when starting grasping with > the language. The use of forms like :word 'word to-lit-word! to-lit-path! > set get etc... can be quite powerful but can also make the code a mess > (like doing things in C like c = *(unsinged short *) &value[]). > And often they are done just to keep the code short instead of making it > clear.
Good point. I agree that published code should be clearer and better documented.
> Then the fact that there's not exhaustive documentation on the system > objects and how to take advantage of them. I have still to understand how > the async:// thing works and where are those info about the > sub-ports/handlers explained in the docs. This is just an example. >
See above.
> Last a request, which may have already been asked, but I have not seen it. > Is it not possible to make the interpreter load binary code so that one > can "convert" the source code to it and have the interpreter load it not > in ASCII form? So, even though the reverse engineering of the binary could > be done, only the basic instructions are there and not the entire clear > source code. This way the users could create "embedded" applications > without having to mess with packages and source code distribution.
Do you know the SDK and the ecnap tools that come with it? Or isn't this what you want.
> [/small rant] > > Thanks for reading.
Keep asking ;-) --Maarten