World: r3wp

Well, it is supposed to be used for forming internet time strings.

How can I check if a word exists without incidently creating an entry 
in the word table for it?
eg this does not work as the act of finding creates the word:
    find words-of system/contexts/user 'no-such-word
    == [no-such-word]

Graham, you're actually asking for mold and form to always include 
seconds... which is something i think i agree with, though, it would 
be much better to finally have FORMAT for all these things.

Sunanda, I haven't checked, but to word! with a string might work, 
as it does not bind.

Slowly like this :

>> probe words-of system/contexts/user
[system a words-of contexts user to string! find context probe]

== [system a words-of contexts user to string! find context probe]

>> find to string! words-of system/contexts/user "no-such-word" 
== none

>> probe words-of system/contexts/user                          
[system a words-of contexts user to string! find context probe]

== [system a words-of contexts user to string! find context probe]

perhaps that should be simplified

Thanks...


Peter -- that was more-or-less the best solution I had. I was hoping 
for something better.


Gabriele -- that seems to work! I'm sure I'd tried it, and it hadn't 
worked for me when I tried it......But it does now. Nice!

I think I got confused because it _seems_ to work of R2 but does 
not:
    find first system/words to-word "really-no-such-word"
    == none
     last first system/words
    == really-no-such-word
Whereas, it really does seem to work on R3.

Isn't the difference between R2 and R3 because words are automatically 
bound to the global context in R2 but are not automatically bound 
to any context in R3.

.... not all words ..just those that are forned with to:

>> probe words-of system/contexts/user
[system probe words-of contexts user]
== [system probe words-of contexts user]

>> 'my-word
== my-word
 
>> probe words-of system/contexts/user 
[system probe words-of contexts user my-word]
== [system probe words-of contexts user my-word]

>> to word! "your-word"
== your-word

>> probe words-of system/contexts/user 
[system probe words-of contexts user my-word to word!]
== [system probe words-of contexts user my-word to word!]

I would suggest, for R3:

 foreach word words-of system/contexts/user [if "my-word" = form word 
 [break/return word]] ; <-- untested.

Seems to work.

Note that system/contexts/user is not the word table, as system/words 
is in R2. The actual word table in R3 is an internal native thing.

Thanks for the clarification.

Can we test if a word exists without creating a junk entry in the 
internal table?

find mold words-of some-context-or-object "word-you-are-looking-for"
Expect it to be slow, at least relatively.

You probably don't need to worry about creating entries in the symbol 
table though. Word lookup is constant-time, and there is no effectve 
upper limit to the number of words it can hoid - you'll run out of 
memory in a 32bit address space first :)

The limit is much relaxed compared to R2 where long running large 
applications needed some very careful word hygiene to not bust the 
2000 [then 4000 then 8000] limit.

But there is documented R3 limit of around 500,000:
http://www.curecode.org/rebol3/ticket.rsp?id=587

Ah, I had forgotten about that (thanks).

Plugins vs plugin blog - make your vote .... http://www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0230.html

Sunanda, latest R2 should be limited at 32k words.

Thanks Gabriele. 32K is getting useful. Sadly, for me. I support 
an elderly View system with a limit of 4100 (or so) words. It gets 
tricky at times :) (I guess we;re off topic for R3 here)

I just discovered that rebol3 can escape a forward curly brace as 
in  str: {text^{}

Is there any way to get  ^{ as an escape comparable to ^}  into rebol2.7.6 
?  2.7.7 ?  Otherwise generating string comtaining both dbl-quote 
" and curly-braces seems quite maddening ...  when using REBOL on 
server-side what is easy in PHP or PERL is suddenly a challenge ... 
or am I missing something about wrapping strings in curly braces 
?

My problem   token:  join  { ^{ text color = "red", name = "test1" 
}  [ token2 token3 ] ; when first value has many options and is spread 
across multiple lines for readability, the string value requires 
curly braces; token  is ok to be   token3:  { some text  values and 
then clsing escaped curly brace^} }

I see no change recorded at http://rebol.com/r3/docs/datatypes/string.html
   Is there really no hope of   {" folowed_by_space then whatever 
chacters I please _ending_with_space _before "}   or some such as 
  {~ space_before_text_then_ending_space_before ~}     It is so odd 
that for our emphasis on value that a string containing  a linefeed 
and an odd number of braces is an error.  After all,   an odd number 
of colons is not an error !   Why MUST we escape characters rather 
than allowing true LITERAL string values ?  We even allow semi-colon 
within braces without an escape !  ;comment anyone?

Robert.  { ^(7B) ^(7D) }   ?? Maybe?

Sounds interesting. A few comments:

- Colons and semi-colons don't have special meaning within REBOL 
string literals - { and " do (depending on how they are specified).

- String literals in programming languages almost always have escaping, 
though the capabilities vary from language to language. Escaping 
is done to include data in the string that would otherwise break 
the syntax. Without escaping you will never be able to include certain 
characters or character sequences.


There's a lot of terms and methods for what you are asking for, such 
as here docs (from Perl), CDATA sections (from XML), etc. An interesting 
idea, though it is usually cause for concern when we look to Perl 
or XML for syntax ideas - that's usually a bad road to take. Remember, 
when you get rid of escaping you limit the characters (or sequences) 
that you can include, though with here docs that limit can be minimal.

Robert, don't be fooled by R2's buggy console. R2 can escape { just 
fine - it's the console that will wrongly think you have an open 
string. Try that in a .r file.

or try:

>> b: load "{ ^^{ }"
== " { "

I totally understand what Robert means... escaping like Brian T. 
or Gabriele shows is crazy if you work with C/PHP/JS-ish sources 
inside REBOL

I thing theere should be whish in CureCode at least.

*wish*

First plugin example posted to Chat. You can get it going to:

1) chat
2) 5045
3) get *

For literal string delimiters, {~ followed by a space seems safe 
as I am unaware of where ~ is used followed by a space and at the 
other end I cannot think of where tilde is used followed by a closing 
curly brace.  Having Rebol always test for nested curl-braces in 
curl-brace values makes Rebol as difficult for my project as is Tcl 
- for the same reason.  Worka-arounds abound but the result has such 
poor usability and readability as to be unusable.

But I will resort to ICON or ObjectIcon or UNICON before I resort 
to PERL ;-)

If the {} are matched you need no escaping.

if they are not, you just need a ^

how is that crazy? I don't see any other way...

What are you guys proposing?

I think they want a multi-char delimiter so that the text inside 
needs much less escaping (or none?).

For example, I think RobertS might be happier if a new special type 
of string which is delimited by ~{ and }~ was added to Rebol.

In the content, single braces } or single tildes ~ would not need 
any escaping unless they happened to be together so that they look 
like the ending delimiter.
Or maybe no escaping is possible/necessary in such a string.

But now I'm also thinking of the start and end unique key strings 
used to delimit email attachments...

Gabriele, the problem is, that if you for example want to form JS 
code from REBOL, you will hardly have matched {} pairs. At least 
that's my experience.

What Robert wants (and I second that) is something like "heredoc" 
notation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heredoc

The wish is submited here http://curecode.org/rebol3/ticket.rsp?id=1194

A77 released - so, we got R3 extensions now :-) More here: http://www.rebol.net/wiki/R3_Releases

3 new blogs posted ...

Hmm, scripts would too easily get "messed up" (that is, very unreadable) 
with Heredoc or similar stuff. maybe we could use #[{   .....    
}]# for that... I'd still rather use external files for long strings, 
and use escaping for short strings (in other languages you have \" 
everywhere, so why bother with a couple ^{ ?)

Gabriele:
Heredoc was suggested *because* RobertS's script was messy.

Maybe *you* would rather use external files for the situation you 
imagine RobertS is in, but I think you're not really trying to put 
yourself in his shoes. Moving stuff out into external files can create 
its own problems. The advice to "just use an external file" suggests 
a deficiency in the language. (One day we may not be using files. 
I hope sooner rather than later.)

A server-side scripting language which cannot handle literal strings 
- and especially one that claims to be Unicode - has to be excluded 
from consideration for templating web content which is expressed 
in any other langauge which uses curly braces.  I told BrianH that 
the red flag here should be Tcl as Rebol shares this with Tcl.  Literal 
string are literal strings.  Period.  No if's and's or "that might 
be my curly brace in there" ...  Unless you dream of a Rebol-only 
world - and that fantasy should have passed some years back.    This 
falls under the heading of folly - a topic too often neglected.  
Folly in a meritocracy usually requires some individual to speak 
up.  But the folly of meritocracies is that  to be heard taht individual 
would already have to be playing within those constraints.  We see 
this in schools which graduate top people distinguished for inidividual 
effort who then do not fit well into teams.  They did group work 
in college by being the one who saved the group from failure by ... 
their individual effort.  For me this will be what makes or breaks 
my involvement with REBOL.  I could not wait for REBOL4 and hope 
for change then by getting into the merit circle.  My outside voice 
would have to be heard before it is too late. Tcl as the do-all is 
folly.  As nuch as I admire OOTcl, the XOTcl IDE and Expect.  I cannot 
use Tcl with "balanced brace" foolishness.  Of course if we all adopt 
XML and abandon scripting in non-XML languages ... So  We have comment 
{  }  and that was a mistake: it should have been symmetrical as 
in c{ comment here as literal with } or whatever }c   And that is 
water under the bridge.  We cannot be UNICODE and claim that  we 
must escape a certain pair  of characters if ithey are in a literal 
string.  That is silly. Ludicrous. Folly.  A literal string is a 
data value where you do not get to peek.  Imagine a proxy object 
that said: "I will be your proxy only if you promise that when the 
real object appears it does not contain [ folly happens here ] " 
  Many forms of "catch-22" in the world of beaurocratic regulation 
have a similar pattern.  I am no expert on unintended consequences, 
but requiring that some pair of characters be escaped in otherwise 
literal content has consequences for TEMPLATE value TEMPLATE  There 
should be a lesson there: some markup must be arbitrary and the choice 
will matter.  { and } are the wrong choice.  At least the terminal 
markup must be "sacrificed (it will always have to be escaped so 
pick carefully.   [{ is a bad combo for JSON so #[{ looks worrisome 
to me.  I propose lit |ls# and_content_then  #ls|    Someone shoots 
that down and we inch towards a suitable result.  Not perfect.  But 
usable.  { and } are not useable in the real world on the server-side 
if rebol is to play a role with other languages.  Play nice.  Please.

lit_str1: lit |ls#    the word lit  indicates that what follows is 
an unconditional literal string much as comment indicates ignore 
only this is a value ; when necessary use the UNICODe equiavaled: 
note that the markup is symmetrically reversed as we end here #ls|

RobertS: not much into that topic, but -  your note that #[{ is worrisome 
for JSON sounds strange. So we should use obscure syntax to support 
some JSON or what? Then comes someone next who uses something else, 
and we will give-up the option too?

excuse me, but what is wrong by escaping by ^{  and ^} ? In R2, left 
curly brace escaping does not work in console only, but script being 
run from file (which is case on the server anyway) is OK. In R3, 
which soon will be ready to replace R2 for such scenarios, it works 
even in console. But probably I am too dumb to understand the issue 
involved :-)


Could someone please give me a snipped of some quoted JS or other 
code, in order to get the issue? Would like to try the headache myself 
:-)