World: r3wp

I'm reading Ubuntu 6.06RC release notes and here's this:

ORCA

Replacing the venerable Gnopernicus is the new Orca, a scriptable 
screenreader for the GNOME desktop. Expect some great things from 
this in the coming months and years. Best of all, it is written in 
Ubuntu's favourite language, Python.

Hm, that's not OUR orca :( BTW, what is its current status?

Lots of things are called Orca. We still need a name change

I'm working with Orca on Syllable. I've identified a number of bugs 
and missing features that I will work on first when I start developing 
Orca itself

I was pleased to find that none of them are showstoppers, though

There were a few unreleased bug fixes for Orca and QUIT/RETURN was 
implemented recently, so I made a new release and put it on FreshMeat:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/rebol-orca/?branch_id=66431&release_id=241129

As Orca is backtracking Rebol why not backtrack the name : lober 
a lob in tennis is to get the ball over the other player : ).  It 
is free on Freshmeat.

I released new source and binary packages for ORCA:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/rebol-orca/

There's a binary for Linux, and this new version is also included 
in Syllable, starting with Syllable Server 0.2 that I just released

Several small fixes and enhancements were made to ORCA over the past 
year, which these packages roll up

I registered ORCA on Ohloh:

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/ORCA

I also registered my Packager tool for Syllable, written in ORCA:

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/Packager

Are there any performance comparison tests between ORCA and REBOL?

I once did a few simple tests and found ORCA to be generally somewhat 
faster than REBOL 2 in basic processing. Both of them were at least 
twice as fast as Ruby

I found the Computer Language Benchmark Game a few weeks ago. Could 
be interesting to make REBOL and ORCA versions of those benchmarks.

Found here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

Many years ago that I looked at it, but wasn't REBOL in there with 
a few tests?

I don't see REBOL in there. I've only known about that benchmark 
a few weeks, so REBOL could have been there earlier and later removed 
from some reason.

It used to be.  Most of the math-intensive ones had been done in 
Rebol, but few of the others.  It skewed the language comparison 
to the "slow" side farther than it should have, since the summaries 
didn't take into account whether all the benchmarks were implemented 
or not.  Don't know if it's changed that part now, though..

Is this ORCA stuff still under active development?

I think not, not for a long time ...

There was a message on the ORCA mailing list yesterday bu Karl Robillard 
annoucing a new incarnation called Boron.


The Boron wiki page is at 
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/urlan/wiki/BoronProject

Oh, cool! Enhancements to ORCA have been trickling in over the past 
few years

Boron looks like a complete ORCA reimplementation, so I changed the 
name of this group to reflect that

Wouldn't it be good, if Boron would be eventually designed to plug-in 
to R3 host code?

My lips are sealed :-)

I ported Boron to Syllable, both Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server

It's not as complete as ORCA yet, but the project quality is higher

It has a shared library instead of a static one, and PThreads integration

interesting thing this Boron .. what are the main coceptual differences 
to rebol? Does it have a QT binding (it looked so)?

ORCA has the bindings and Boron was started specificaly to update 
them, so they should work already

I hope Boron is returning to the loose goal of REBOL compatibility, 
but as of yet some things are missing

There's a new word reference that shows status and compatibility:

http://urlan.sourceforge.net/boron/doc/func_ref.html

Hmm, 'term-dir instead of 'dirize

because its a specific version of  'terminate

'infuse sounds suspect too

I actually like that function's idea.

'ifn instead of 'unless

funny, those are the two thing I thought where noteworthy.. hehehe

ifn ... very bad style.

And a few that've been truncated. Doesn't seem like a good road to 
go down.

Need an example of 'infuse...

the way I understand it is:

reduce bind block context

What is the license of Boron? I've been having trouble figuring that 
out from the posted site. Is it BSD-compatible, to allow binary linking?

LGPL

That's compatible with BSD, GPL and many others