World: r3wp

But in the interim I'd lost my AltME password, and Rebol's community 
had become something of a moving target anyway.  So I looked at R3 
chat.

So I am new, and I am also not that new.  I'd like to propose that 
Rebol embrace visibility in new mediums, like StackOverflow.  Anyone 
with an RSS reader might want to subscribe to the latest Rebol-related 
questions: http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=rebol&sort=newest

cough cough ...

Someone posting rebol questions has been accused of spaming ...

Well, he wrote a lot, but there are still only 80.

[Pehaps this discussion belongs more naturally in the Advocacy group, 
rather than a newcomers' questions group]

I'll talk wherever.  But I was just going to speak about preferred 
mediums of communication.  Carl has his, I have mine, y'all have 
yours, etc.

And my favorite is wiki.  Now here we are -- you want to recategorize. 
 How do you?

Personally i think we need more web boards ... and not this dark 
net stuff

moving to Chat, I guess?

or ~humor

One thing that I noticed (an obviously *doh* moment) is that it's 
hard not to accidently start trying to reinvent the wheel with Rebol 
programs. There are so many excellent tools, utilities, and games 
allready made..  Question is more ofthem than not, where do I find 
what´s been made, how well it´s been kept updates etc.?

joanna - the best aproach is to probably ask here. We have few old-time 
rebollers here, who might remember some gems. One of them being me 
for e.g. OTOH - sometimes I am surprised, I can find real gems in 
rebol.org archive. So - rebol.org, google, ask on mailing list or 
here on AltME ...

Thanks, I´ll do so when I have something spesific in mind..  I was 
wondering how much Rebol has changed in last 10 or so years, in a 
sense that If I find an neat script what are chances it still works 
as it´s shoudl be.  At the moment I have this feeling that this current 
v2 Rebol shoudl be bit more compatible than upcoming V3 ?

R3 is not very compatible with R2

most R2 script will work unchanged. There were, however, some changes 
to VID over time, so older VID scripts might not work with newer 
VID (View) engines. As for R2 to R3, Henrik is right - most scripts 
will not work ...

...most script will not work...
 - an uninformed and unsourced opinion

How many scripts did you try to port?

I have no plans on jumping into R3 at this point, since there are 
so much even on R2 I need to learn. But for the future reference, 
is there any plan for a tool (or mode in Rebol itself) to help Flagging 
out those R2->3 differences... For example, I remember seeing that 
PICK works differently on R3 (right, unlike R2 which is offsetted 
by one), it'll be quite hard to spot all those from source alone, 
since parameters are often defined at runtime?


Some changes will of course be obvious (for spotting), like sockets, 
since their parameters have been canged a lot. but difference on 
data readiding/writing (ascii/binary/unicode etc) may hide itself 
quite a while.

Hmm I need to read some things again to be sure I have even got it 
right..  (and I'm sure this is issue that has been wel discussed. 
before, sorry)

Yes, there is a difference in Pick behaviour, but keep in mind, that 
behaviour is different only in exceptional cases

Ladislav? Really? So just go and try rebol.org submissions, one by 
one, and then tell me, how many of them actually will work ...

I did not tell that porting would be difficult, but I better try 
to tell ppl, that simple do %my-r2-script.r in R3 might not work 
right away ...

But I have no problem standing corrected :-)

Wrong, it is you who stated something without trying

Even if such a statement was correct, I insist, that mine is correct 
too: uninformed and unsourced opinion.l

Be nice, boys :)

Well.. The fact of life is that *if* you can find an computer system 
(even officially stadartized programming language) that works exactly 
the same 10 (or more) years, it's development obviously must have 
ended..  100% backward compatibility is totally impossible, question 
is how well the situation is handled, documented etc..

There's no comparison draft; if it's what you're asking

Well, OK, may have been too harsh, sorry, I just don't like unsourced 
statements like the above.

A good idea that, especially once we get out of alpha and things 
stop changing so much. Most of the core semantic changes have gone 
through already - current development focus is in areas with no corresponding 
concepts in R2. We'll see how much the multitasking affects things, 
and the proposed object! changes.

the time invested in learning R2 is not lost when you switch to R3.

Just avoid to pass to much time on GUI aspects and Ports handling, 
they are/will-be completly redisigned.

Plus there is a project to backport some of the R3 improvements to 
R2 so you can use some of the fun new toys. A project I should get 
back to soon, I might add. Some things won't be compatible but it's 
amazing how much can be made to work.

must be cause R2 is Turing complete

Naw, that's not it. That wouldn't explain the stuff that can't be 
easily backported without rewriting REBOL from scratch.

Joanna asked about the forward compatibility: R2->R3. There is quite 
decent backward compatibility (R3->R2), as BrianH is proving, and, 
of course, the forward compatibility is even better.

Steeve: well, sometimes things take time..  It took me decade (or 
was it two) before I got <build  does> .more or less right.  And 
I still don't get Lisp.. (nor have I tried it in years)..

mostly, speed-up improvements. except for 2 functions AFAIK.
Do you know which ones guys ?
(Brian, you don't play :-)

It might be easier to get this than it is to get Lisp. Lisp says 
that code is data, but it isn't necessarily so. Code realli *is* 
data in REBOL, at runtime, and the whole language is bilt around 
it. Once you get that it's amazing how easy the rest gets.

What I mean about lacking compatibility: Things like ports are totally 
different, so we can't directly port protocols. They have to be rewritten. 
VID is also an entirely new system that bears little resemblance 
to the original VID. AFAIK using DLLs is also very different. But 
of course many functions may work the same, even if they are rewritten 
underneath.

I bet, that it would be easy to port the old VID from R2, to R3, 
but it is unlikely, that anybody would want to do it.

yes, it might be possible. there were also talks about emulating 
VID at some point. maybe that's better left for a hobby project.

Brian: I noticed that I had earlier (ears ago) missed the Rebol word 
  Compose  entirely..   No wonder some things seemd to be ackward..

'Compose was an addition to get round some awkwardness ...

i'm not sure it's easy. The flow of GUI events is drived very differently. 
It's could be a burden to simulate the R2 behavior.

Well, Compose is not comfortable. More comfortable replacements were 
proposed at http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Replacement.

To be honest Ladislav, i don't see the interset of the INLINE function.
What can be done with INLINE, we can't to currently ?

The answer to your question is dead simple: nothing.

ahah, a lighter syntax ?

In fact, the Inline function can be implemented as a mezzanine, which 
would serve as a proof, that you can do without it, if you wish.