[REBOL] Re: Commercial-quality REBOL programmers needed
From: joel:neely:fedex at: 17-Aug-2002 8:38
Think linguistics, Dick,
[reffy--ulrich--net] wrote:
> Dialect??
>
> Could you expound on this idea? If I create functions/variables
> named in a domain sort of way and use those to solve a problem,
> have I created a dialect?
>
To the extent that you package them up in a way that allows the
user/programmer to treat them as a new/extended language specific
to the task as not just as function calls within REBOL.
If I just define the word "flerbish" to mean "an email of more
than a dozen lines", have I created a new dialect of English?
Probably not.
What if I define enough of a vocabulary (and possibly some new
syntactical forms) to allow meaningful discussion within a
specialized domain?
Perhaps so.
What if I create an English-like notation/language that not only
allows such discussions, but is adopted as the common means for
conducting such discussions within a community of speakers/users?
Very likely so.
REBOL reminds me in this regard of a comment made quite a while
back about FORTH, another extensible language:
"FORTH is not a programming language; it is a
programming language construction kit."
At the risk of sounding vague, what we're dealing with here is a
matter of style, approach, and philosophy as much as it is a
matter of pure technology.
-jn-
--
; Joel Neely joeldotneelyatfedexdotcom
REBOL [] do [ do func [s] [ foreach [a b] s [prin b] ] sort/skip
do function [s] [t] [ t: "" foreach [a b] s [repend t [b a]] t ] {
| e s m!zauafBpcvekexEohthjJakwLrngohOqrlryRnsctdtiub} 2 ]
