World: r3wp

http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwsassenrath_en.php
<--- Interview with Carl

very interesting stuff!

thanks. 


that's a very nice article to read ....as a lead-up to REBOL Devcon 
2007

thanks guys for your comments at Osnews ...

I'd hope to avoid the open/closed source debate. I don't plan to 
comment on it. I'd rather discuss the language features.

the problem is, with 3.0, we are discussing vapor yet. There are 
3 new OSNews posts re Amiga and ppl start to react negatively to 
it - because all those years anything amiga related was maybe announced, 
but never delivered ...

It would have been more appropriate to wait until after the devcon

posted my comment too, pointed to RebGUI :-)

There's a pretty strong reaction to my little video. I think we should 
focus a lot on video tutorials.

what video?

see last OSNews post

I watched the videa ... really cool! No other form of tutorial can 
express that ...

you can claim rebol is easy to use, you can provide your tutorial 
with code sample plus screenshot, but video shows it nicely ...

I would really like to do more videos, but it would need some scripting. 
I think we should have a video group.

even cooler one would be to start viewtop and run few demos, as particles, 
calculator, showing its short source code etc :-)

what tool was used to do the video?

I don't remember the name, but it was a Python based screen capture 
tool that generated a Flash video.

moving to Video Tutorials

Henrik - you are doing great service on amigaworld.net :-)

yes, but now I need a Scheme expert :-)

thas it Jaime :-)

I think threre is no need to argue with folks there. What is more 
- they are "pro amiga" already, so they potentially respect Rebol 
:-)

the guy who looks to be hooked into Rebol now is typical example 
of user who might find rebol usefull - small configuration script 
writers, etc.

Intel have announced a new low-power processor and chipset architecture 
which will be designed to allow full internet use on mobile Internet 
devices. To fulfil the aims of our mission and in response to the 
technical challenges that these devices pose, we are announcing the 
Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project.


https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-May/000289.html

What does everyone think about Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo?  Desperation 
or 

sound tactical move?  I wasn't watching the tube, but it was on in 
the background,
did I hear correctly that they are banting about a number in the

$50'000'000'000 range?  I think you'd hear the yahoo! from here in 
Canada. :)

Henrick, What kind of Scheme help do you need ?

Henrick, I saw your post reply to my Macro comment on AmigaWorld.net. 
I'm trying to understand the difference, but maybe it is too early 
for me to understand it. Here is a link that describes what Common 
Lisp Macros are.  http://www.lisp.org/table/macros.htm

Paul: we've had this argument before, and I guess Jaime will not 
agree with me; also I've not read the posts on amigaworld, so i'm 
just talking in general about rebol and macros (sorry); anyway... 
rebol does not need macros. the reason is that lisp is a compiled 
language, so there is a difference between compile time and runtime. 
macros in lisp execute at compile time, functions at runtime. in 
rebol there is no such difference. you can write control functions 
in rebol without the need for macros, for example.

Jaime, it's probably too late now, but a person on Amigaworld.net 
wanted to know some of the main differences between REBOL and Scheme, 
as his first though was that REBOL looked a lot like Scheme without 
the parantheses.

Gabriele, Paul was asking for the difference between macros and dialects 
as he thought they were the same.

actually there is no relation. a macro is some code that is executed 
a compile time, and returns some other code (that is then compiled). 
basically, before compiling, lisp expands macros, like the C preprocessor 
expands text macros (of course, since lisp macros work at the list 
level instead of the text level, they are more powerful).

dialects, instead, are languages based on the rebol syntax. in a 
language you normally parse a text file into some internal representation, 
then you work with that representation (interpreting or compiling 
it)

in rebol, the internal representation is values, and you can do what 
you want with them.

Gabriele;  *poke*poke*  I hope we get LOAD/RELAX.  :)

Remembering that argument, I hope we get the opposite: Parse block 
rules for strings, a sort of parse dialect unification.

Well, something that will let Construction workers type in their 
own data is what I'm

hoping for.  Whatever the actual approach.  Though, the easier for 
me the better.  :)

Some more thoughts on the MS DLR http://vistasmalltalk.wordpress.com/
   His other entries particularly the Ironpython and Smalltalk ones 
are also very interesting.

The question is will the DLR as implemented on .Net and Mono provide 
a level playing field?

I think the DLR may be one of the more significant releases from 
MS in a very long time.

Will Rebol be able to play in this arena, and make use of Python, 
C#, Ruby, JS code?

Gabriele, Even though there Scheme uses two stages the line between 
compile time and runtime is not the same as in C. You can write macros 
during runtime that get compile on the fly and avaialbe without ever 
stopping a program. So in this sense the two phase is just process 
is not really important. The feature that macros brings is syntactic 
abstraction. Also in Rebol you can not do low level control structures. 
That is you can not add foreach without having a looping construct 
already in place. So the mezzanine is slow. Compare to delimited 
continuations of Scheme where is  only control structure and recursion 
and optimized goto. You construct other control syntaxes on top of 
that.

In Rebol adding control structures that are efficient requires coding 
in C. In Scheme adding control structures only requires Scheme.

The form use to introduce a  macro is define-syntax. Which allures 
the their syntatic abstraction function. Macros in Scheme are extremly 
powerful and complete. I understand that dialect in Rebol can be 
as powerful, but the techniques required in Rebol for good dialecting 
fall in the interpreter construction realm, which depending on the 
dialect can require more or less effort from the programmer than 
a macro. Context protection in Rebol is something that is importat 
to consider.

An if you mix dialect lexicon reuse can get tricky. Scheme macros 
are hygenic meaing they take care of name clashing for you.

Thank you Gabriele, I understand much better now. :)

Jaime: that is debatable. continuations are the control structure. 
so it's hard to say that in rebol you need a native control structure 
while in scheme you don't - of course you do. :) also, be it JIT 
or not, compilation is still compilation. it requires knowledge about 
the code before evaluation. which means, that there must be a syntactic 
difference between code and data.

also, if you accept to have a syntactic distinction between code 
and data, it is easy to add a macro preprocessor to rebol that works 
just like in scheme. (so easy that there's no need to have it in 
the language itself. try a scheme without macros, and try to add 
them in scheme itelf... ;)

Just got an email about this:
Micro Focus COBOL acquires Acucorp COBOL: http://www.acucorp.com/

Maybe it's time to do that COBOL dialect in REBOL!? ;-)

are there any language clones done with dialects at all?

I think %prolog.r from the library may count.