Hi Joel, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I'll respond in one lump rather than trying to pick out sentences to quote and comment on.
Implicit/explicit Return. This is a matter of style. I tend to always have an explicit Return, to the extent of writing return true to show that I am NOT returning the result of the previous statement. I'd expect a Lint dialect to enable me to turn that rule on, and you to turn it off. That way we both get a usable Lint checker rather than none at all. And yes, it would be difficult to write. And yes it may be derailed by various dynamic changes as a program runs. But who wants to write easy programs!? And I'd suspect most Rebol code would not cause such derailings. Rebol (at least on the web site) present itself as a language for Internet/collaborative programming. But it seems in practice to make life difficult for both those things: -- I write some code that calls something from your site that calls something from someone else's. And at some point it crashes with an "Error near a / b". Is that my code or yours or the other person's or a Rebol-supplied mezzanine function? I don't care how un-purist it is to expect the call stack to be printed. But I need it at this point or the application is dead in the water. -- I think we've all agreed that we find different styles harder to read than others. So if you and I are collaboratively developing code, I'd want to prettyprint yours into a style I prefer, and you'd do the same with mine. This would open doors to collaborative programming. I think there is a philosophical difference between your approach and mine. You are making the case that it is difficult to do something 100%. Maybe that makes you a purist. I'm saying, no worries there, give me the 75% that can be done, and I'll live with the holes, or apply development standards to ensure I don't go near them. I'm not sure what that makes me: a pragmatist or a barbarian? I hope you'll agree that we both have valid cases to make. I hope also that RT are listening to this list and can apply their skills as language designers to solve the problems I see while not damaging the purity we both admire. Sunanda. -- To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, without the quotes.
