World: r3wp

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

You got it right. Look at the DocBase article.

I was. I think the problem I had deciphering the example in the DocBase 
article (http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Closures) was that I am used to 
function-creating closures because of examples in other languages.

Well, in the case you did above the effect of the closure is on the 
code block you pass to the inner call to func. A closure! is returned 
by the closure function above. When that closure! is run, the func 
call in its body then creates a function that is returned.

In other languages their equivalents to FUNC or CLOSURE are declarations 
- in REBOL they are actions.

okay, so I need to study more about what a closure actually is :-)

hey while your working on REBOL3 add something that can do this  
 alias object/item "myfunc"

We could really use a feature that can do that or if someone knows 
how to that would be cool.

It's pretty simple really, as long as you realize that the closure 
function creates a value of the closure! type. The main difference 
between a closure! and a function! is that a closure! creates a context 
every time it is run and binds the words in its body to that context, 
like USE in REBOL 2. A function! just uses a special context instead 
with stack-local references, which goes away when the function! is 
done - there is no REBOL 2 equivalent to that, but a C function is 
close.

Paul, I'm not sure which of the arguments is supposed to be the alias 
and what is supposed to be aliased. Try
    myfunc: does [object/item]
or
    object/item: does [myfunc]
depending on which direction you meant.

ALIAS is really only meant for internationalization. Assignment is 
for value aliasing, and functions are values.

Is there a convenient way to list they keys of a map?

Not yet. It's on the todo list.

ok, thanks. Sorry for the questions, I'm just rummaging through the 
bag of goodies that is R3 right now.

Actually, you bring up a good point. There is currently no reason 
to know what keys are currently defined in a map because in theory 
all possible keys are defined in a map - they just don't have values 
yet. If you try to retrieve the value for a key that is not in the 
map yet, you get #[none] (the value, not the word). If you want to 
not have a key in the map, just set its value to #[none]. Yeah, that 
key may be physically still in the map, but who cares? The effect 
is the same - the only difference is memory usage.

If it matters to you whether a key is in the map or not (regardless 
of its value), you should probably be using object! instead. With 
object! there is actually a difference between the key being there 
or not, and you can always expand an object with new fields if you 
need to in R3.

Anyone that is not a fan of the Win console.  Try Cygwin and install 
rxvt.   (No need for the X11, rxvt runs beautifully as a windows 
app).  It's not as featured as the REBOL 2 console, but it's a step 
up (and a little sideways) from the dos console.

If that works, tell me. I haven't been having any luck in using alternate 
consoles with the R3 alpha - the stdio device is broken.

Anyone else think it's kind of freaky when we have 3 Brian's messaging 
in the same group at the same time? ;)

It's just multiple views of the greater Brian ideal :)