Peter W A Wood wrote:
> Again, I am influenced by Rebol.
I've not used Rebol, but have read much of its documentation at various
points over the years. Carl Sassenrath is an interesting thinker, and
his language reflects some very unusual and intriguing concepts.
Aside from MetaCard I've seen almost no other scripting language but
Rebol that wholeheartedly embraced the concept of delivering
applications over the wire.
Way back in the day I imagined I might have enough time to flesh out
some Rebol-like concepts in what was then called "Revolution", but this
was as far as I had time to go:
go url "http://fourthworld.net/channels/Revel.rev";
Underneath that would be a lightweight syntax for describing objects
similar to Rebol's auto-layout capabilities. I made just enough of it
to allow sparse descriptions of objects and have them created on the fly
in somewhat reasonable locations, but never had the time to take it as
far as Rebol did. And like too many other things on my hard drive,
without an immediate need for using it in actual work, I can't say I
have any plans to get back to it. :)
I'd be interested in your opinion on Rebol dialects:
<http://www.rebol.com/rebolsteps.html#section-10>
They seem a key feature of the language, an opportunity to create
domain-specific languages from the core Rebol language.
In this regard it seems a similar set of goals to the proposed Open
Language initiative for LiveCode. Not directly the same, but similar in
the way that many of Python's design goals almost perfectly parallel
LiveCode's design goals, even though the expression of those goals has
taken very different forms.
Do you have any thoughts on the strengths or weaknesses of Rebol's
approach vs LiveCode's for creating domain-specific dialects?
>> To be fair '?' poses less of a problem in this regard than '.' - in
>> terms of limiting future options that have been discussed at length
>> in the past ;)
>
> I was surprised to read this as I started using this convention when
> one of the LiveCode team commented on somebody’s code that used the
> same convention and said “some people in the office have started
> using it”. Of course, I can no longer find the comment. If you think
> it is an unwise convention to use to avoid name clashes, I will adopt
> another one. Any suggestions as to a good approach/
A lot of xTalkers express Boolean functions with something list "Is*",
e.g. "if IsList() then...".
But given the support from the two Marks maybe it's not a bad thing at
all for old-timers to learn new tricks.
BTW: I like the tidy way your array contains not only the data but also
the index value, keeping everything in one place. Nicely done.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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