[REBOL] Re: Viewing two or more copies of the same layout. Thanks!
From: robbie_armour:hotma:il at: 11-Feb-2004 15:28
Thanks for the help everyone, I know you're all very busy just now. I'm
just getting to the level where I should have worked that one out for
myself.
I have some miscellaneous thoughts and findings from my own short journey in
Rebol:
Parse rocks. Unbelievably simple and fast with it. Going straight from
readable BNF to having a working syntax checker is nothing short of genius.
BRAVO!
The ability to add new variables to objects would be nice - an instant
alternative to hash! and more elegant.
text-list/picked should be a list of index integers rather than the
displayed text.
On Unix, open2 would be nice, although I should really write a wrapper to do
it with sockets.
I think to make a lot of money from Rebol it must be opened up: not
necessarily open-source but free to a higher level (eg to View + ODBC level)
just keeping encryption for the priced enterprise level (really the only
guys who'll need it?). On the ODBC front, I think DocKimbel's brilliant
mysql-protocol must have eroded most of the gain in keeping database access
priced.
A browser plug-in would bring a much bigger audience, and personally -
working for a large, pretty staid, predominantly MS-centric corporation - I
think Rebol would need to do OLE Automation to do all the things we want
(we'd pay for it). If it could, it has all competition beaten - central
code control, lack of .dlls and shallow learning curve all being huge
benefits (we have loadsa trouble with Visual Basic and incompatible dlls &
drivers). Maybe we'd still have some of the dll problems but at least we'd
have the fun of writing in Rebol.
id #143 in track.r refers to binary OR, AND & XOR bug in Mac OSX and Amiga.
Similar bug also exists in current Linux Sparc and UltraSparc releases.
Serious bug if you want to go there!
Docs and other web resources are the weakest link: some great stuff, but
patchy. Rebol/Core documentation is excellent - the combo of User Guide and
Dictionary is first rate. One area I would like a bit more of in the Core
User guide is context, scoping, 'use and local variables and (what caught me
out with layout) what happens with 'make and sub-objects. Also, when does
one object = another? I really look forward to View 1.3 (and detail docs on
all "widgets")! On the web site front, Reboltech is very interesting, but
there's a lot of broken links. Brett's codeconscious.com is great, but
beyond me some of the time.
Re documentation discussions on novice, intermediate & expert level: get the
readers to tell you the level(s) they want as they access it? Great use for
colour-coding too.
Would you like a hand with anything - beta testing or documentation perhaps?
Thanks again for your speedy help,
Robbie Armour
