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[REBOL] [Bot] email command Bot

From: mauro::fontana::speedautomazione::it at: 26-Mar-2004 9:31

Hi all, 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. 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 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". 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. 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. 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. [/small rant] Thanks for reading. M&F