World: r3wp

(it was certainly not a prototype of any specific member of the current 
equality coparison hierarchy)

Are we doing equivalence within any-block! or limiting it to within 
any-path! ?

re last question: supposedly True

(ie. I would take the any-block variant)

but, you may propose a different alternative, if you don't like it 
for some reason

One alternative is equality within any-path!, within any-word! and 
within any-string!, but not within any-block!.

yes, the only difference is, that I considered any-block! to be the 
counterpart of any-string!, but that is just me

Another alternative (the current one) is equality within any-word! 
and any-string, but not within any-block! or any-path!.

I think, that currently the equality within any-string isn't imlemented

sorry for the typos

I consider any-block! and any-string! to correspond as well, but 
the question  is whether EQUAL? should do the same.

You are right about the equality of any-string! - not implemented 
yet.

yes, this needs to be decided specifically for the purpose of equality 
comparison

Remember, EQUAL? is the simplee default for people who don't want 
to worry about things. We have more strictness later down the line, 
buut a little strictness in EQUAL? would help newbies in some cases.

a little strictness in EQUAL? - do you mean, that newbies may be 
more comfortable with finer (stricter) or with coarser (less strict) 
version of EQUAL? in this case?

Yeah. It's hard for me to judge, but equivalence within any-block! 
seems confusing to newbies. However, equivalence within any-path! 
seems to be similar to equivalence within any-word!, so we might 
want to implement it.

We should ask Fork - he seems to be the designated newbie advocate 
these days :)

:-)

ARN (The Association of Rebol Newbies) president

(it is hard for me to understand what he means quite often)

And vice-versa, in my experience, but he's very intelligent so that's 
not it :(

yes, the problem is, that I am used to different terminology

My problem is that my vocabulary is too big and precise for most 
people to get the subtle distinctions :(

I found, that complete newbies are frequently outside of the range 
of my understanding. After discussing a couple of things in the fora, 
they start to become understandable even for me :-)

Most of Fork's recent complaint about tag! in R3 came down to not 
making the distinction between "join" (JOIN and REJOIN) and "adjoin" 
(AJOIN). If he had been around for the discussion that led to the 
creation of the AJOIN function it woldn't have been a problem :(

is seems to be caused by the fact, that I am prepared to assign too 
many possible meanings to their questions to be able to detect what 
they are actually asking

Contextual decoding issues :(

It looks like an algorithm similar to EQUAL-STATE? will work for 
structural equivalence if you get rid of lines 518 and 519. Some 
of the comparisons should be relaxed to the same level as the comparison 
function you are implementing too. I notice that it does topological 
similarity rather than strict structural equivalence :)

yes, but this algorithm is rather slow for Rebol standards?

hmm, seems I am using different line numbering

It will be native (inside the actions). Most of the silly stuff inside 
IDENTICAL? goes away if you are doing C code. The done lists can 
be more efficient too.

The lines to remove:
            a: head :a
            b: head :b

yes, but what about the search? that is O(n)

The done lists can be hashed on the pointer values.

these index issues - there are simply too many variants of equality 
- the Equal-state? comparison is certainly unrelated to any of the 
currently proposed hierarchy levels

(it looks to me like a level slightly above Strict-equal?, but below 
Same?)

Just mining it for the topological equivalence algorithm :)

if you look a bit further, you can see, that even to define what 
is cyclic can be ambiguous, there are two such detector functions 
in the text

All that matters to me is cyclic references after the referenced 
position - values before the position don't matter to anything but 
SAME?.

yes, looks fine for the comparison

same? is actually the simplest comparison, it is much easier to find 
whether two values are the same, than whether they are similar

btw, did you notice there is a deepcopy function? (the http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Identity#Making_a_deep_copy_of_a_.28possibly_cyclic.29_block)

Yes, but I haven't traced it yet.

Ladislav, I've tested random some more. The equal sign, =, is used 
to test in the end of RANDOM, if the result should be changed to 
0.0. This will change more values, than if =? was used. I use =? 
in my test. My test goes like this:

REBOL [
	Title:		"Random distribution test"
	Author:		"John Niclasen"
]

random/seed now
dist: clear []	; distribution
tt62: to integer! 2 ** 62
a: tt62 - 1024
loops: 100000
loop loops [
	i: random 1024
	if i > 512 [i: i + a]	; test close to 0.0 and close to 1.0
	y: i - 1 / tt62 * 1.0
	if y =? 1.0 [y: 0.0]	; the result of random 1.0
	y: form y
	either find dist y [
		dist/:y: dist/:y + 1
	][
		repend dist [y 1]
	]
]
while [not tail? dist] [
	dist/1: load dist/1		; change strings back to decimals
	dist: skip dist 2
]
dist: head dist
sort/skip dist 2	; sorting distribution
print dist
mean: 0.0
foreach [value count] dist [
	mean: value * count + mean
]
mean: mean / loops	; calculating the mean value
print mean	; this should be 0.5


The test is testing values close to 0.0 and close to 1.0. Notice 
the high count of 0.0 result compared to other low values. Also notice, 
how the mean value is close to 0.25, where it should be 0.5. Try 
out-comment the change of y to 0.0. Then the result will be much 
better.

The equal sign, =, is used to test in the end of RANDOM, if the result 
should be changed to 0.0.

 - actually, you caught my doc translation error (the code is in C 
 and I "automatically converted" == to =, which does not correspond 
 well

to the other code: so, it looks, that it is difficult for you to 
test the actual implementation, i.e. the random x function, where 
x is decimal. No wonder, but I have and idea how to do that.

re the equal sign - see the corrected http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/functions/random.html

moreover, your random/seed now does not make any sense in case like 
this, you should use random/seed 0 or something like that to make 
sure everyone obtains the same result

Carl states, that time-zone precision was rised to 15 minutes. Is 
it any usefull? :-) http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0217.html

Any and all fixes to time would be good.