I've had a bit of "down" time, so I have been able to finish writing
down some notes on what I believe to be a useful way to understand
series behavior in REBOL. (Of course, I don't recommend getting the
flu as a standard technique for catching up on one's correspondence!)
The entire essay ended up being longer than I'd like to send in a
single email, so I'm breaking it up into chunks as follows:
essay/0 - is really just background commentary, not part of the
essay itself.
The content of the essay begins at index 1... ;-)
essay/1 - describes the overall model and establishes some
terminology used in the rest of the essay.
essay/2 - uses diagrams based on the model to visualize the
effects of translating from source to internal form,
setting and getting
essay/3 - continues by looking at "pure" functions on series
values (i.e., that do not have side effects)
essay/4 - describes a couple of "impure" functions (i.e.,
functions that DO have side effects)
essay/5 - takes another, deeper, look at setting
essay/6 - use the model to describe copy and copy/deep
If this helps anyone understand and use REBOL better, it will have
been successful (in my view). If anyone thinks the model is
incorrect, I'd be grateful for any concrete examples of REBOL code
for which it predicts an incorrect result.
-jn-
