Even I make mistakes<g>

If anyone tried to order either REBOL FOR DUMMIES or REBOL: THE OFFICIAL GUIDE yesterday, you found your order would not go through, even with all the correct information. Why? Even I flub up on occasion. The forms are now fixed and orders go though fine. The mistake was a dumb one (as opposed to a Dummies one) and I reveal it since you may find such instructive in your own coding. I wrote this really slick little credit card validation function (published earlier on this list) Saturday. Tested it rigorously, and it worked fine. So I dropped it into the order forms; tested them briefly; all seemed fine; so I went live with the changes. Then I get e-mail this morning from a couple of people who tried to order books yesterday and the orders would not record. Here's the mistake! One of the REBOL words I defined in my credit card validation function was the same as one in my form processing script (but the words, of course, did different functions). This mismatch did not crash the script (such would have pointed to an obvious problem) but rather caused a more subtle misoperation; i.e. orders would not record. The moral of this tale? Document! I stress that in REBOL FOR DUMMIES. If you don't document, scripts sometimes will coil around and bite you on the .... well, anyway, I fixed it<g>. Best, --Ralph Roberts Soldier of the REBOLution

Hi Ralph, modules will hopefully reduce the likelyhood of name clashes in the future. For now I think that using objects helps to avoid this kind of errors in scripts that evolve over time. Another trick is to execute a trial run while PROTECTing all of those words that one wishes to keep unique. Name clashes will then become evident when a word is inadvertently reused. The following script can be helpful. Given a script file filename.r it writes a new filename.rp file. input: filename.r output: filename.rp When you DO the script filename.rp all globally defined words in this script will be PROTECTed. Attempting to redefine any of these words will result in an error message. How it works: The script prompts you for a filename or a directory name. If you provide a comma separated list of filename, the script will process all the filenames provided. If you provide a directory name the script will process all the files in that directory. Hit return if you want to process all script files in the current directory. You do not need to provide the current directory name. The script assumes that the files you wish to process have the extension .r . If a filename does not have the ".r" extension, the script will add that extension, regardless of whether or not the filename contains a different extension. The script loads the script file, identifies tokens that will be defined in the global context by the script it loaded and creates a new script file that has the same filename as the original file. It replaces the ".r" extension by the extension ".rp". The script appends two things to the original script file which it saves in the .rp file. 1. A block called __set-words. This block contains all globally defined words in the script (with exception of words that are defined by using the set function.) 2. A foreach expression that protects all the words listed in the __set-words block. If you subsequently attempt to load a script that redefines the same word, you will get a word protected error, which will alert you to those globally defined words that are being redefined in this other script. You can easily test the script by first running it to generate a ".rp" file, DO the .rp file and then DO the original .r file. Example: 1. First prepare a .rp file:

>> do %protect-words.r

>: %test-prscript.r

>> do %test-prscript.rp

>> do %test-prscript.r

>: }

>If anyone tried to order either REBOL FOR DUMMIES or REBOL: THE OFFICIAL >GUIDE yesterday, you found your order would not go through, even with all >--Ralph Roberts >Soldier of the REBOLution

thanks, Elan... handy stuff.