World: r3wp
[Dialects] Questions about how to create dialects
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Fork 27-Jun-2010 [559x4] | If the existing Rebol community thought it was useful to create a localized version of Rebol, you probably would have done it by now. Because it wouldn't be hard. |
My point is, it wouldn't hurt anything in the existing ecosystem and who knows, maybe it would take off in China or wherever and create a new market. | |
Like I say about web pages which have chinese characters in them... Google doesn't prohibit them or not index them. It knows not to show them to you unless you ask, if you don't speak Chinese. Or they translate it. With the kind of thinking you're promoting, you'd just say "they should write in English, that makes the world more compatible." | |
Is it worse to have a Chinese programming ecosystem out there which you don't draw code from, or to have them all writing in Perl and Ruby and Python? | |
Gabriele 27-Jun-2010 [563x3] | hmm, AFAIK, the reason Carl wanted to remove ALIAS is that in 10 years of R2 nobody ever really used it except to show what it can do. |
so I don't think anyone is "against" a localized rebol, it's just that noone is really interested in that. what happens is you start playing with it and think it's cool but you never actually use it (i did play with an italian version of REBOL in 1999 or something like that). | |
ie. ALIAS is solving a problem that nobody has. | |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [566x3] | I think there's a big gap between the usefulness of a spanish or Italian localization and a chinese localization. |
If Alias permits one to set up word equivalencies, then it's solving a problem I have with Rebmu. | |
(Which I will again say is not some kind of joke. It is trying to position Rebol as the leader in Code Golf, and I'm tuning it so that knowledge transfer with Rebol is as good as it can get. Random example: I did some tweaking so that now first+ isn't FP anymore, it's F+ and all the functions which end in "+" are understood as being in the family of those which modify their arguments. A+ FOO BAR is understood to add foo to bar and store the result in foo, for example.) | |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [569] | You will reinvent FORTH if you continue :) |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [570x5] | Also I changed AN for AND~ and OO for OR~ into "a~" and "o~", thus keeping consistency with the Rebol notation for prefix operations, because the prefix ones are the ones that make sense in character count minimization. I'm bending and thinking of what makes those look common and came up with "n~" for NOT, even though Rebol doesn't have a tilde after prefix NOT (since there's no infix not). So it's a balance of consistency. |
@Steeve ... but look at the "Doomsday Clock" modification to my hourglass solution | |
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1683857/code-golf-hourglass/3110684#3110684 | |
The "oh, and another thing..." part of supersetting the Rebol by staying pure to the dialect rules is the baby in all this bathwater. That's what will blow people's minds. I'm only scratching the surface there because I'm still working out the kinks. | |
But by comparison, look at the ridiculous "Golfscript" solution which has to resort to shell scripting to loop the "stdin": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1683857/code-golf-hourglass/1687686#1687686 | |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [575] | can't you use one char length for those ? OR AND NOT = | & ! |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [576x9] | Empirically those are not good candidates for one character optimization. |
i (if-true-mu) and e (either-true-mu), which can be remapped but are by default mapped to their equivalents "IT" and "ET" (there's also WT for while-true) are pretty good one-character ones, but even those can be questionable. But they are reasonable defaults. The point of one-character-choices in Rebmu is to anticipate the need for flexibility for redefining them, to use as variables or whatever. | |
Originally I had "r" and "w" for "readin-mu" and "writeout-mu" but found that w for while was more frequent than the number of writes, and in fact I also found that my writeout was not as useful as print's default behavior, so I remapped w. These one-character decisions are in flux as I look at how some of my ideas are panning out in real solutions. | |
This "mushing" I've come up with is delicate, because of course I can't break Rebol's parser... so I have to work within it, and the language is beholden to what forms can be naturally combined without spaces vs. those that require them. | |
Anyway, the various crack-smoking mods I'm doing (such as if-true-mu being able to take constants in the code block and evaluate to those constants without the brackets) are intended to be minor things... something one could quickly unlearn in Rebol programming and say "Oh, right, you need a block around that." Increasingly I'm backing off anything which is overly focused on character optimization at the price of creating a pattern that is too far off from a reasonable Rebol programming practice. | |
It applies to for instance not Huffman encoding the names for the sheer sake of saving characters. The abbreviation has to line up with the Rebol word in some vaguely reasonable way. | |
Another issue of using single character symbolic things for operators is that because they lack a "case", they don't play well with mushing. [A&b] unmushes to [a: & b]... [a&b] unmushes to [a&b]... [a&B] unmushes to [a& b] .... and [A&B] unmushes to [a&b:] | |
Consequently, you're better off with a two character A~ for AND~, because you'd end up having to throw in spaces on the left and right of the & all the time otherwise, which gets you three characters, and you'd probably have to throw one on the left half the rest of the time. | |
Is there a "weirdest dialect" award I'm going to win with this? :) | |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [585] | Well, you could prevent not alphabetic chars from being part of any word. It would make sense.| |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [586] | It doesn't make sense if trying to retain compatibility with lowercase Rebol code. I want to be able to paste "to-string" in the middle of a Rebmu program and have it "just work" |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [587] | hum ok |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [588x4] | Again, that is the baby in this bathwater. |
To superset Rebol when coded natively, in lowercase. | |
I'm glad you tackled the connecting dots problem, though I don't think your solution worked... but it was in the spirit of my desire to see Rebol step up to these challenges and prove itself. Because if it can win at anything, it can win at this. | |
And like I say about my Hourglass solution vs. the "winning" golfscript solution... it broke the rules, it has no reusable parts, it exploits symmetries and gimmicks in the problem such that if the problem specification changed only slightly you'd have to rewrite the whole thing. | |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [592] | Well, i saw the remaining problems in my code, correcting them would not enlarge so much the length of the code |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [593] | In solving it I found that like with many code golf problems there are some little "nuances" which emerge as you look at it... |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [594x2] | Bit I don't think we can beat the shortest solution |
*But | |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [596x2] | Specifically, there are cases when lower numbered dots can connect and cross over the second digit of a larger numbered dot |
That forces you to basically build a map of the numbers before you start drawing the lines :( | |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [598] | Yes I finally understood that point |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [599x2] | A lot of these problems have gotchas like that where you think "oh, easy I'll just do it like this..." |
Then you get there and realize "oh crap" and suddenly you've added like 50 characters | |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [601] | :-) |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [602] | Did you go through my solution at all? |
Steeve 27-Jun-2010 [603] | Sorry not at all, If you could decipher your code for me... |
Fork 27-Jun-2010 [604x5] | It's simple at heart. |
Well, if what BrianH is true I may need to write "unrebmu" sooner rather than later | |
So this line here: "w [j: d ++ n] [ro g [x j y j]]" is that building of the initial coordinate map. It keeps incrementing n, and passing it to the "d" function which returns either the coordinate pair where that digit resides (or none if the digit could not be found). | |
while [j: d (++ n)] [repend/only g [x (j) y (j)]] | |
Er, no the d function returns the series position | |
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