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[REBOL] Re: facts we will have to face ...

From: carl:cybercraft at: 24-Oct-2001 11:05

On 24-Oct-01, Petr Krenzelok wrote:
> Hi, > reactions to OSNews.com interview really seem as a little bit of > advertisement of rebol fan ;-) But I think we will have to face > following voices in future: > ---------- > Since apparently everyone here but me is a REBOL worshiper,
Chuckle. So far I've not managed to convince anyone to hop on board the REBOL ship - neither programmers nor non-programmers. The programmers are happy with the languages they already know, while it's hard to convince typical users of REBOL's value. "What's the point of a desktop on top of your desktop?" And distributed computing worries them, they not liking the idea of their apps being automatically updated and feel it's the thin edge of the wedge towards a world where you rent your software. That said, I'm sure companies with workers in many different locations are easier to convince of REBOL's value.
> Can REBOL do audio? Does it support MP3 native? How about more > obsure audio formats? If not, is it fast enough to decode it if you > wrote the decoder in REBOL itself?
This from the OSNews interview... From the system side, we will add several new dialect" engines for 3D graphics, inferencing ("AI"), additional network protocols, advanced sound synthesis, and more." Hopefully an "advanced sound synthesis" dialect will give us good audio control and include native MP3 support. I doubt decoders written in REBOL would be fast enough though given the amount of decompression required.
> What about movies? Can it play sorenson quicktimes? Does it have > support for AVI? Once again, you should be able to add in movie > support or codec support by writing it in REBOL itself assuming it > truely is a complete platform like they say it is.
Okay, an idea. Let's assume REBOL has its own internal format for music, movies and such, as it has with images. What's needed are libraries that cam convert the various formats into REBOL format (and back again for saving.) These libraries need to be cross-platform - not OS-specific. So, how about if RT creates a simple virtual-processor and virtual-machine-code dialect that's designed specifically for converting one file into another? JPG-to-image!, image!-to-JPG and so on. (For once RT wouldn't need to worry about this being simple to use, as those happy with machine-code are the only ones who'd bother with it. All they'd need to worry about is that it's fast.) Then, as long as RT publish the specs for their image!, movie! and so on datatypes, others could write the libraries for converting the various outside formats to and from the REBOL native formats. Anything wrong with this idea? -- Carl Read