[REBOL] Re: Slashdot REBOL mention
From: lmecir:mbox:vol:cz at: 31-Oct-2001 19:33
Hi,
I made a mistake writing the description, my apologies (I warned you, this
is not an easy notion to define).
The correct description would be: If we DO a BLOCK, we evaluate the words it
contains according to the normal semantic rules (you can find their
description e.g. at my Rebsite). That is true regardless of the context the
words are bound to.
If we instead used block as a parse rule, BLOCK would have been evaluated
differently i.e. not according to the normal semantic rules. That is again
true regardless of the context the words are bound to.
[Romano wrote:]
> Everything is a dialect in Rebol.
This isn't a dialect definition I would suggest to use, according to that
all languages would be dialecting, because you can change the variables in
any language.
The existence of dialects doesn't distinguish (C and Rebol e.g.) languages.
The real
difference is, that we can define our own Rebol dialects (using PARSE e.g.).
PARSE can be used to totally change the way how the block is being
interpreted.
Rebol can easily handle blocks, which can be basically considered sentences
of the language. The interesting consequence of that is, that as opposed to
C, Rebol will never have any macro language, because Rebol is a macro
language for itself. (Don't you like that?) A "buzzword" that communicates
this meaning is, that REBOL is a language with meta-circular semantics.
The above feature makes the language much more communicative than any other
language not having the feature is.
Hope the text is a little bit more consistent now.
Regards
Ladislav
