I think that there's a very practical pseudo-ergonomic reason why
all of these "verbs" have their arguments in the order:
take-action upon-this-thing with-these-other-things ...
To use Petr's example of
save %where what
the overwhelmingly most likely (IMHO) case is that %where is a file
or a word that references a file, and that the what expression can be
arbitrarily more complex. (I.e., more likely than to have a complex
expression that resolves to the file being written into, with a very
simple expression for the data value.)
Speaking for myself, about the most complex expression I normally use
for the target of save or write is something resembling
write to-file string-expression data-values
whereas it's very common for me to have something of the form
write %some-file complicated-expression-to-evaluate-...
...into-the-data-vaue(s)-to-be-written-to-the-file-...
...previously-named
Given the absence of argument list delimiters, long involved
expressions (and, hey! this is an Expression-Based language, right ;-)
can require careful attention to layout/typography to be readable.
This goal is enhanced by placing the shortest complete parts first.
DISCLAIMERS:
1) I have no idea whether this was a deliberate choice in the design
of REBOL. But it makes sense to me.
2) I'm well aware that our German friends (for example) a literature
whose style long, sophisticated utterances with verbs deferred to
the end includes have. So all of the above conjecturing very
likely culturally influenced has been. Perhaps those of us whose
native language American or British is a tendency toward attention
deficit disorder have.
-jn-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> OK Elan, I don't feel myself so experienced as you surely are, but how e.g. 'save
> fits your rebol language philosophy?
>
> save %where what ...
>
> It was the most confusing thingy once I first came to the language. Maybe just
> czech language mind mapping works a little bit differently :-), but imho we first
> think of what we want to save - as to save the content is on some purpose - e.g.,
> prevent loosing data, and only then we decide, where to store it, as it is just
> secondary problem ...
>
> So? :-)
>
> Thanks,
> -pekr-
