Ladislav, thanks for pointing out highfun.r!!!
It sure is interesting that make-adder works with the old Rebol 1
but not with the newer ones. What exactly did we lose?
What work-arounds are feasible?
I assume that the change was some deal with the devil that
RT made for more speed. Still, it would be nice to know how
the system is doing things internally, descriptively at least.
Where is the clear explanation of context and so forth?
I remember a while back somebody was asking for a something like a whitepaper
on the language and at the time people either denied it's usefulness, or claimed
it would take
important developer time away from improving rebol so it couldn't be
written, or that nobody there seemed to understand the request.
Andrew initially defended the lack of such documentation in taking the position
that
nobody else documents their crap, you just have to fool with it till it works,
like every other system we've all had to get working.
Except that Lisp and Pascal and many others are in fact very well described.
And really we are talking here about the core functionality of the language,
not trying to get Rebol to cough up source code nor to dwell on the details of
the implementation of web protocols. We just want to know how to think
about the process so we can write correct programs based on understanding.
I still don't even use parse for any but the simplest things.
If I had a burning need that nothing else could satisfy I probably would sit
down and grind through the details, but short of that I may never go any deeper.
The examples available for parse are certainly better today than they used to
be,
but they are not that easy. This really means that only expert users with a
penchant for playing with parse will get much out of it. Regular users will
merely boggle. I suspect however that it is actually possible to document
parse better so that more people would be able to make it over the hump.
Please chime in, everyone!
-galt
