World: r3wp

i was discussing about "writing easy to understand mezzanine" again 
 "compact and fast but maybe hard to understand mezzanines"

if your code is slow, can always speed it up by running a faster 
cpu :)

machine cycles are cheap .. brain cycles expensive

but at some point, if your code is too slow and too huge, it will 
not be reused, so that you'll lost your investment

if your code is not maintainable it will not be re-used either.

Or, you'll have a job for life!

the scalability is also linked to the compacness.

Suanda, it was partially your article (alongside CS Rebol3 blog) 
that got me wondering loud about potential need of tools/flag/tag 
related to R2/R3 differences. I'll move some thougths about this 
to Advocacy.

Peter: "All 824 pass under 2.5.6." - then I would say, that the tests 
are biased in favour of R2 2.5.6, since I have lots of tests failing 
in 2.5.6

The 824 tests are unit tests of the production Rebol.org system which 
still runs in 2.5.6. So in that sense they are biased in favour of 
 2.5.6. My point was that many of them still work unchanged under 
R3.


The two main reasons that I started to build the Rebol.org unit tests 
was that they would help stop bugs being introduced when the code 
is enhanced and also help when it comes time to upgrade the version 
of Rebol that Rebol.org uses.


Sadly, I haven't written anywhere near the number of tests yet to 
reach my objectives.


(By the way, I wrote most of the tests before R3 was announced; I've 
recently converted them to a test framewoirk that also runs under 
R3.)

Joanna: "My point behind this forward/backward compatibility chat 
is primarly, that I'd like to see a way to stop average user on accidently 
loading old scripts on R3." - this issue already exists even in R2 
- there already are scripts, that work in older versions of R2, but 
not in the newest one (ask Peter, how many of his tests have problems 
in the latest R2), and, vice versa, some scripts written for the 
newest R2 don't work in older versions

Shadwolf: "all the scrpts made accross the 10 last years usng REbl 
2 wll then not be usable with R3" - if that is a statement, than 
it is demonstrably false

It's refreshingly humiliating starting to get some clue  how little 
I know about Rebol and related stuff (AltMe for example) ..  :-)

I occasionally forget how refreshing REBOL is. As soon as I have 
to work with somehting else, I remember. :-)

Good example of short simple goodie that will twist one´s mind if 
one has not used to things like lisp, sheme and forth.. It took me 
a moment to realize what's the point in this one. but I think I got 
it..
 
 a: func [x] [print x] 
 b: func [] [a: 42]
 a b


As found from http://www.rebol.com/docs/changes.htmlat section 3.8

This is a great example of where these docs NEED to be a WIKI!


Then we can come along and break this down, give more than one example, 
and put notes and dicussion (chat) with it.

Yeah, that's why we've started doing so. Two, one official one for 
the manuals, one community one.

How about start by taking this current entire HTML doc from Carl, 
and simply turn it into a WIKI.
If he give his permission, then it is that easy.

Joanna, the reason for that is that REBOL has 3 different types of 
argument

Sorry, hit the wrong key

Reichart, we did that for R3 already, and it is one of the plans 
for the next month for R2. Thanks for pointing out that the changes 
doc needs to be in the R2 manual wiki as well.

Cool, can you post a link to that?

The plan or the finished product?

For R3 the wiki is at http://rebol.com/r3/docs/- for R2 it will 
likely be at http://rebol.com/r2/docs/when it's done this month.

Yes, the first one was exactly what I was looking for.

So can anyone update this wiki?

There is also a community-run MediaWiki site at http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Main_Page

Anyone with an R3 chat account with enough rank can update the official 
manual. You get rank by knowing what you're talking about and not 
being a jerk who wants to mess things up. Not difficult criteria 
to achieve, so far.

Shame... to much of a barrier to entry.

Rather, everyone should be allowed to post anything.

A moderator should be able to push stuff to some "sideline" (not 
delete though).  This will simply keep the s/n high.

When REBOL is no longer a clique, more people will will feel like 
they are "welcome" to join in.

That is what the community-run site is for.

It's spam protection

(for the European's here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique)

That's why we have two wikis, so the manual can become more official, 
like a book. We only want answers in the manual. We have other places 
for questions: The community wiki, chat, CureCode.

clique is a french word Reichart ;-)

REBOL is big in France :)

*hush* :-)

Steve, yes, but...many words in English are French, that does not 
mean they are used the same way.  So I think it wise to post this 
just in case...

clique = to click = to make sound

Steeve...

same meaning here

;-)

Joanna, the reason for that is that REBOL has 3 different types of 
function arguments, and they have different evaluation rules. If 
you want to know how an expression should evaluate you need to know 
what kind of argument it will be going into, if any. The first expression 
evaluated is the one that returns the function value, the a expression 
in your example. Once that expression is evaluated it no longer matters 
what is assigned to 'a, since the function to be called is now referenced 
by DO.

After this month the plan is for "R3 chat" to be an obsolete term, 
since R2 will have it too. Just "chat" I suppose, or DevBase.

That's the plan, at least :)

I checked the result on 2.7.7 and A was as it shoudl be 42 ..  If 
it had been anything else I woudl have noted it as a Bug ..

Thanks for testing that :)

Works in R3 too.

Reichart, CHAT shouldn't be a barrier to entry. We are trying to 
make it more accessible.

CHAT in this case just being the function that brings up a DevBase 
client - it doesn't even implement the client itself.

We're trying to make DevBase more accessible too, with better clients.