World: r3wp

Peter, thanks. The progress of unicode support is vefy important 
to me.

really? well, then you should know that first alpha with unicode 
support was released for testing :-)

That is great! :>)  Thanks for that news, Pekr.

UTF-8 is a strict extention of ASCII, but ASCII is only defined between 
0 and 127. Characters 128+ are not ASCII, they are extensions, and 
their meaning depends on the codepage. The codepage of an 8-bit string 
is unknown, unless you specify it externally (or do a lot of statistical 
calculations). Strings or scripts with characters extended by a codepage 
will have to be translated by a codepage-to-utf-8 function or process 
specific to the particular codepage, ahead of time. Fortunately, 
such a process can be fast and even implemented in a byte-oriented 
language easily.

Other than UNICODE, will there be an UNISEX version of the interpreter 
? :-)

what? sex? :-)

rebol is sexy already :-)

Sometime better than, you have more fun !

BrianH: I undertstood that UTF-8 can be multi-byte depending on the 
Unicode of the character being represented.

Yup.

ASCII characters fit in one byte, the rest take some more. It can 
progress up to 5 bytes but those are rare.

Is my reading of Docbase correct that string! values will be UTF-8 
encoded?

That is currently under discussion.

Thanks....if there is a vote please add mine to that of Louis.

I'm happy to report that the preliminary Linux port of R3 alpha, 
which offers REBOL/Core functionality, runs on Syllable Server

nice :-)

Kaj, you're welcome to document any bumps in the porting process. 
We will need it all for porting to other systems.

I will, but I didn't do any porting yet. This is just an ad-hoc binary 
build I got

I will need the open host source code to get further

Is it time for some news/update? A little tickle to stoke the excitement 
 for us on the outside.

well, I have a new rebcore.exe file in my r3 internal release directory, 
which is different from the other internal releases. I'm not yet 
sure what that means. :-) (seriously)

I know people are cooking up some nice examples for a public release, 
but it's not ready yet.

Have the Alphas been release to more people yet?

I want to text the alpha to see if it still has a nasty bug that 
I couldn't post in Rambo because it reveals source code.

no not yet. tell me about this bug, please? perhaps I can test it 
for you.

Well it has to do with ports

It seems that a port function that I created cause it to output C 
source code

ports are very different in R3, so I don't know.

interesting

well, the port system is completely rewritten from scratch, so perhaps 
this bug no longer exists.

As if the C source code was in REBOL

sounds very odd and interesting :-)

I sent Carl an example of the problem some time back via feedback 
but never heard anything more about it

is it simple to reproduce and can it be reproduced reliably? normally 
bugs must be both before he will look at it.

I posted directly to you

Some news: Maarten has stepped up to become release manager, while 
Carl "retreats" to kernel development. This means that work is under 
way to provide a public alpha release, but no time table is yet known.

Yes, and I will need some volunteers to do parts of the work. More 
will be posted here soon (vacancies); if you see anything you like 
message me privately.

Wait just a few more days....

I can volunteer to sit on the ml and reboltalk.com to monitor those 
lists, answer some questions, and eventually put those significant 
ones here (or to r3-alpha) for the consideration ... I like having 
Henrik around, as he has different pov on the things, so various 
angles could be covered ....

an interesting note from Carl just now: The graphics system as implemented 
in R3 produces a lot of garbage, which means there are still many 
optimizations that can be done. In a way, I'm thrilled to hear that, 
because it means that it will be even faster and less memory intensive 
than it is now, which is pretty darned quick. :-)

Thanks Maarten, very glad someone is taking that load off Carl.  
I can only hope it means a more steady stream of information will 
be available as well a public alpha (at some point).  I was going 
to ask for an update since the latest blog entries are more than 
a month old now.

I do volunteer to help as well, can proof read documentation, run 
tests, and other miscellaneous tasks.  My only constraint is the 
help has to be in my off hours, can't conflict with my day job. *smile*

we will defnitely need both proof reading and general opinions on 
the documentation. it can always be improved.

Rod: that goes for most of us. The time table is not carved in stone 
yet so I am not going to give a date . But we're making very good 
progress for alpha1

Maarten, I'm ready to help with your vacancies when you have a need, 
just let me know.

Thanks, Rod.

I will surely come back on the vacancies. Right after alpha1 is out 
we'll need some people to step up and bootstrap the community

loving the closure

Try source use :)

The docs example didn't tell me much, though. Maybe something like 
this?
	>> adder: func [a] [ func [b] [a + b] ]
	== function!
	>> adds-two: adder 2
	== function!
	>> adds-two 5
	** Script error: a word is not bound to a context
	** Where: adds-two
	** Near: adds-two 5
	>> adder: closure [a] [ func [b] [a + b] ]
	== closure!
	>> adds-two: adder 2
	== function!
	>> adds-two 7
	== 9

... or maybe I'm getting the idea of closures wrong in R3?

cool, BrianH