World: r3wp

Yes, it was corny then too.

AFAIK the compliment only works because it was also a term in the 
80's meaning "cool".

Hence the pun, even when Borland coined the term. If you want to 
know what it referred to, look at every development environment nowadays 
which has a visual GUI designer, especially those that affect the 
code directly when you make visual changes. All high-end IDEs in 
modern times are cheap knockoffs of Delphi from the early '90s (back 
in the Win 3.1 days), even Visual Studio.

I suppose the NeXT guys didn't have much to say in that? Maybe my 
history is not good on that. When did Delphi come around?

Before NeXT by a few years.

But the modern IDE style folows the Delphi model. Especially the 
MS tools, since they licensed the patents (and poached Borland's 
employees).

Maybe that's one more reason why no-one bought NeXT boxes (aside 
from the price).

And also the Sun and Oracle tools, since the component model of Java 
was designed by Borland. And Eclipse, since it emulated the MS tools.

Developers did buy NeXT boxes to cross-develop for other platforms. 
And some apps got ported to Windows later (I miss Lotus Improv).

NeXT's visual form designer was based on Smalltalk's. Delphi followed 
a different model altogether.

Smalltalk came first, of course.

And I think NeXTSTEP preceded Delphi by several years, in fact. Of 
course, OSX's present-day interface builder app is a direct NeXTSTEP 
heritage. But we're way off-topic now, I guess :)

VB came before Delphi, and I think Interface Builder beat them both.

NeXT (85) came WAY before VB (91) and Delphi (93)

I still have my BW and Colour NeXT, I have my original copies of 
Windows 1, and VB, and Delphi...

Ah, OK, cool. I just have the last 3, was too young for NeXT then. 
Delphi was based on Turbo Vision, a DOS product that came out after 
Windows 1 iirc, but the GUI builder was new. Which came first, VB 
for DOS or VB for Windows?

It's really interesting the different approaches taken around that 
time. I was studying and writing UI frameworks in the early '90s, 
starting before VB and Delphi came out. It would have been cool to 
see a NeXT machine in more than magazine articles. The IB model is 
gaining acendancy with the newest platforms now: OS X, WPF, Glade 
(don't know about the Qt stuff). Most of the corporate-backed Java 
tools still follow the Delphi model though. Flash still seems to 
follow (an advanced version of) the VB model, but Flex probably doesn't.

I don't remember VB DOS/Win, but I recall odditites back then...

It has been an interesting story indeed. VB/Win came before VB/DOS, 
Turbo Pascal begat Delphi, and Turbo BASIC became Power BASIC...and 
is still sold, supported, and updated by the original author (Bob 
Zale) who got the rights back from Borland. 


VB/DOS had a very short life. Only one release as I recall. The problem 
was that it was up against established libraries from Crescent and 
Microhelp, which were mostly coded in ASM, and for which you got 
all the source.

Wow Dr. Graham, I didn't know you were our Dr. HOUSE

quite handsome ;-)

I was trying to persuade them to use the "?" image that I use on 
Qtask !

Nice, Graham.

Meanwhile, in the UK, we're being advised to opt out of such systems 
;)

   http://www.itpro.co.uk/621304/bma-calls-for-halt-to-electronic-patient-records

In the UK I would; the UK is turning into a surveilance society. 
EMR records need strong assurances that they won't get into the hands 
of those who would do you harm, even if that includes the government.

EMR records -> Medical records

In Denmark we can't figure out how to make EMR systems, so we have 
no fear of private information leaks.

in Quebec, they are slowly convrerting the whole civil system into 
using Electronic records.  There are a few recorded cases where patients 
have been greviously harmed (or died) because hospitals do not share 
records.


here the records are the property of the hospitals and these are 
worth money.  Even if the medical system is public, each hospital 
and region is managed independently.  the Govt is having a hard time 
getting all the medical infrastructure to cooperate.

One possible reason is that its very easy to uncover ineffeciencies 
once you can do queries and compare hospitals and individuals.

and by infrastructe, I include institutions and people... not just 
software and networks.

infrastructe = infrastructure

ITPRO doesn't use a spelling checker!   "IT PRO recieved an updated 
statement from the DoH which said: "This project has been introduced 
over five years and has never been rushed."

I was hoping that the Sultan might turn up so I could ask him to 
spend a few spare million on R3 development but sadly he was otherwise 
engaged

Go Graham!

Yep.  Go Dr Go

...

Cyphre - thanks for posting this. In this days of silence towards 
R3 development, this is really encouraging. I am glad that I was 
at least usefull to chearlead you to post this news, and come-up 
with the name, which I really like - JITTeR :-)

Dang, I replied in Announce. For anyone working on AltME, or an AltME-like 
forum, if you have special groups like Announce, or Links, where 
responses should be hidden by default, don't make us go to another 
group to post them.

Cyphre, really cool.

Guys, thank you all for positive feedback (either here or in the 
Announce group ;)). There is still lot of work to reach Beta version 
but I hope I planned the next milestones realistically so those interested 
will have something for play relatively soon :)

Rober: will you publish some examples and or tutorials?

Yes, going to add the stuff to rm-asset.com tomorrow. But it's really 
just a basic demonstrator.

Robert, are you using an IDE for working with D or just an editor? 
I've taken a look at D-IDE and it sort of works, but seems kind of 
flaky. Going to check out the VisualD add-on for Visual Studio next. 
Also tried Sublime Text - it's a pretty nice text editor with Python 
scripting and it has partial TM bundle support (snippets, language 
defs for syntax coloring, themes).

Just an editor and the CLI.

I don't see that much value by using an IDE. The compiler is pretty 
easy to use.

Yeah, most extensions probably wouldn't involve too many files to 
manage and code should be easy to debug by printing to output. I 
never looked at D closely, but it does seem to be a really nice alternative 
to using C/C++.

It is, it makes your life a lot simpler and is worth to get into 
the language.

this might be what I needed to get me into looking more closely at 
D.

thanks for your efforts Robert.

great! very cool code ladislav, and extrem usefull to solve the lack 
of handling pointers, nested structs etc. in rebol.

with peekpoke.r we are now able to use a much greater bandwith of 
external libs and a very important improvement 

for rebol in creating commercial apps.  could this be incorporated 
directly/native into R2/3?

There are two discussions going on related to this subject:

http://www.rebol.net/wiki/DLL_Interface

and

http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0317.html

But, as far as I can tell, none of them looks "concrete enough" to 
be useful