Howdy Assembly, INC EAX!:
> if ANYONE has any PROS and CONS that they can throw in about
> either please email me privately or to the list. Just please
> anything can help.
>
> :)
I have a school mate who is a PERL fanatic that I was
recently exchanging email with. When the subject of REBOL
came up, he hadn't heard of it before. After a cursory web
search he responded sourly about what he had first read
about REBOL, but asked me to make a case for it. I include
a portion of my response to his message below that it might
be useful for your assignment, Assembler.
( And last I heard, my PERL brained pal was giving REBOL a
second and third look.. (-: )
-------------------------------------------------
> Uhgh. Human readable data formats? Yeachk! What a waste of
> bandwidth. (I suppose that would "<REBOL code letter>--" or
> something.)
What are you talking about?! You'd rather non-human
readable datatypes? Human readable datatypes means that
instead of having to construct a URL with strings or structs
in REBOL you just write the url, ie:
print read http://www.rebol.com
REBOL knows what a URL is as well as most other network
schemes (finger:// ftp:// whois:// pop:// nntp:// daytime://
dict:// etc.) It also knows money when it sees it, knows
email addresses, issues, tuples (ip addresses). It knows what
to do with these datatypes (in the above example, it fetches
that web page, knowing what you mean when you say
"READ http://some.web.site") You save bandwidth by not
having to pass all the additional information around of how to
construct and treat these ubiquitous forms of data. In REBOL
you also save space because you need far less quotes, commas
and other syntactic punctuation as you do in other languages.
But if you prefer incomprehensible datatypes, REBOL
certainly gives you the power to obfuscate your code and make
it as cryptic as you like. :-)
> Okay, that's my first thought about REBOL. Now tell me why you
> like it, if in fact you do like it.
REBOL is a free form context sensitive first class
functional language with prototyped based objects and cloning.
It offers both static and lexical scoping, full polymorphism,
is its own metalanguage, weighs in at roughly 200 KILObytes
(yes that must sound ridiculous to people who are used to
giant barely capable bloated language kernels like PERL)
presently running seamlessly on 38 platforms (from palm units
to the unixes, to windows, to amiga). But the real cool thing
about REBOL is its network omnipotence. It makes it brain
dead simple to get things done in a networked world, from FTP
to NNTP, HTTP to SMTP and on down the line. REBOL also
provides a very simple abstraction of direct TCP/IP sockets,
fully BSD capable, including razzle dazzle multiplexing.
There's a powerful built in predicated parser which
accepts context free grammars (a SUPERSET of regular
expressions). REBOL handles binary data quite handily. It's
y10k compliant. Security can be specified with fine
granularity (like you can say in a script for REBOL to "quit
on all file access except to this given file and quit on
network access except reading" so that you prevent DOS attacks
as well as locking down the script from being able to read
/etc/passwd, overwriting .profile etc).
All the other languages out there are yesterday's
technology, written for a much different world than today's,
and they've been relentlessly patched and bloated ever
since. REBOL was created with today's computing in mind. It's
clean, lean and mean! REBOL rules!
I could go on all day... :-)
-jeff
