On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, you wrote:
> surely Rebol already does some of these things, for example the SEND command
> invokes a "dial up networking" on windows platform if the CONNECTED? command
> returns "False"
No, Windows does this internally, if you enable its "dial on demand"
("auto-dial") feature. This is not something REBOL does explicitly.
> Regarding configuration details presumably these are READ from %User.r ?
Just reading them does no good. REBOL would have to tell the OS to actually use
them, and most operating systems do not have documented or standardized APIs for
that.
> The functions requested here ie CONNECTED or DIAL are not that earth
> shatteringly complex
Unfortunately they are, because they involve accessing custom hardware, through
custom (sometimes non-existing or undocumented) APIs, with custom dial settings,
custom IP settings etc., and many of these details are undocumented or keep
changing from one OS version to the next (or in the case of Linux, from one
distribution or installation to the next). Please trust me on this, I have spent
the last six years developing software for Internet dial-up. It is a very
frustrating experience.
> all we want is implement these Rebol Words / Functions
> in a way that is consistent across operating systems.
And that is exactly the difficulty.
> For instance DIAL: sureley Rebol "could" invoke the PHONE-DIALER say on
> Windows and pass the configuration details & instruction which could be
> 'READ from a seperate file.
AFAIK, no it could not, because Windows lacks the APIs for that, but I only
looked through the specs briefly some time ago. Even if it worked for most
ordinary dial-up connections, it would fail for the growing number of ISPs that
require custom software, e.g. for many cable/DSL/satellite setups, because
those definitely do not have documented APIs.. It would probably fail for AOL
and Earthlink as well, because of the custom software they use.
--
Holger Kruse
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
