World: r3wp

No

Ranges only interest those who  need highly optimized scripts (avoiding 
any memory overhead)

In that case, the CHANGE refinement may be the only viable way for 
Carl

there are several implementation choices in Rebol where we can say: 
Carl does not bother with the memory issue

and extra speed consideration of having to allocate/copy/destroy 
a series

I like your #1570 proposal, Ladislav, but not the name. Perhaps /span 
might be better, or /range.

/length

it's true, 'change/part does not behave correctly by default.

insert/part et append/part do the right thing we want now for change

That's said too much; I think it's more that CHANGE/PART behaves 
as advertised and the /PART refinement just happens to have a different 
meaning for INSERT or APPEND. 

Neither one of /WITH, /TO, /SPAN and /RANGE communicate very well 
that they refer to the second argument though, and /TAKE has the 
drawback of suggesting that it's taking away from the second argument 
like TAKE instead of leaving the second argument untouched. 

CHANGE/FROM, however, seems to work:

>> head change/from #abcdef #123456 3
== #123def
>> head change/part/from #abcdef #12345 1 3
== #123bcdef 


All that under the assumption that for compatibility, /PART in it's 
current meaning will stay as it is.

It's funny, I always thought INSERT/part was the weird one, and CHANGE/part 
the normal one. Didn't stop me from adding /part to APPEND though, 
in the INSERT style.

I agree with Christian, except that /from doesn't convay the proper 
meaning... another refinement name might be better...

something like 

change/part/only to from  3 4
change/part/amount to from  3 4

?

except that /only is already used... but I'm just suggesting in the 
lexical sense... something closer to the meaning of the refinement.

That's why I suggested /span or /range :)

i suggest  /?

it's short

/?  !?!!??!! 

and meaningless  ;-)

meaningall

change/interval ?  (spelled corectly if necessary)

Comment added: http://curecode.org/rebol3/ticket.rsp?id=1570&cursor=5#comments

Gregg, I used to use append/part to avoid the memory overhead of 
copy/part in many case.
Instead of doing like in the Ladislav's example. 
>> change/part something copy/part something-else range part.
I used  to do.

>> change/part something append/part clear #{} something-else range 
part.
It's not faster, but saves memory.


So, I don't know if it's a good idea to discard this use case from 
append and insert.

Esp in R3

(It saves memory, if the same code is called many times, indeed)

Re "it saves memory" - it is not expected to save memory (the GC 
should handle such code "smoothly")

Sometimes, I can't let the GC acts by himself because it's too late 
and tens of MB would be allocated for nothing.

But I agree it's rare cases, with intensive computations. Rare, but 
it exists.

It does not matter that it is rare: if you can find any unexpected 
of the GC, you should put it to CureCode as a major bug

unexpected behaviour of the GC

It's not a bug to my mind, the GC never acted smoothly.

maybe I just misunderstood, then. If it is not a bug, then you are 
actually saying, that the GC collects everything as expected? If 
that is the case, then why the trouble to "save memory"?

(I just tested, and your example is much slower than the code allocating 
and GC-ing the new string)

Yeah it's true, it's slower.

But if your app contains many loops with many copy/part at different 
locations, the memory may grow insanly before the recycle.
I saw that in many graphic apps with Rebol.

I saw that in many graphic app with Rebol
 - are you sure it was "before the recycle"?

Sometimes you don't want to put too much pressure on the GC, and 
sometimes you don't want to increase the total size of the pool too 
much, because that pool doesn't always get returned to the OS very 
quickly or at all. This is the motivation for additions like the 
/into option.

We'll see how much optimizations like that need to be undone once 
we have to adjust for task safety :(

the GC doesn't return the pool... only image data is ever returned 
AFAIK.

and the GC doesn't kick in too quick or it would be really slow  
(just try recycle/torture to see ;-)


so when you're doing serious work it REALLY grows... although it 
stabilizes


for example although stats often show 10MB... my OS tells me that 
its actually using 24 MB.  that will never shrink back down.

Is there a place for the newbie questions on parsing?

You've come to the right place.

I've created my very first script. The script loops through a list 
of email (Kerio) log files, extracts the IP addresses, compiles them 
in a list and adds them to a (Peerblock) list in order to limit incoming 
spam. I find rebol perfect for this.

So an entry in the log file starts like this: "[15/May/2010 17:59:56] 
IP address 190.101.1.10 found in DNS blacklist SpamHaus SBL-XBL..."

aye

Improve the script by reading only the latest entries in the log, 
and I pare the date like this: parse/all txt [thru "[" copy found 
to "]" ]

So I get the job done. This is the question: If I do parse/all so 
that spaces are not automatically included, how to I include the 
space in my parse rule?

A rule can be: "=," etc. How do I "escape" the space character so 
that I can include in my rule?

I've always used the spaces as delimeters

parse k [thru "[" copy date to " "]

I've used parse/all, and then used 'trim on the results.

Yes, that is exactly what I did and it works. However, for the sake 
of learning, how do I use the the space character as part of my rule?

don't see your point, show us the annoying rule...

Ok, I will. The point is that I want to include the space in my rule. 
Here's the example: