World: r3wp

which is where?  I'm getting circular links

http://www.rebol.com/rebol3/=> http://www.rebol.com/article/0347.html
=> http://www.rebol.com/rebol3/

http://www.rebol.net/wiki/R3_Releases

Ok.  Thanks.

gotta go to bed. there are some more docs about VID3 in Docbase.

My take is VID3 will not stay way it is now ...

Meaning?

too complex?

Is there much point at looking at it until Carl has decided where 
it's going?

I think not ...

I was told to hold off on documentation for VID3 months ago; pre 
Unicode release even.  And I may not be the best tech writer for 
the task anyway; as I didn't really "get it" to a level required 
to write the good end-user docs REBOL deserves.  We'll see what happens 
in the upcoming days.

Perhaps we need a "rebgui" for R3 as well ... ie. a simplified gui

That's what I hinted to on the blog.

though should a simple gui scale to a complex one?

But Gabriele is a super smart REBOL coder; so I'd like to see his 
efforts rewarded. I just couldn't keep up with some of it; at least 
not quickly enough to  produce end user docs that made any sense. 
 :)

two development efforts don't make much sense though

Some of Gabriele's stuff does tend to be somewhat hard to use

Though that could just be a documentation problem

I trust Carl to come up with something nifty.   VID2 is a dialect 
layer on the View engine, and I think Carl appreciated Ashley's work. 
 Much like the inventor a new paint watching an artist make a wicked 
cool painting.


Yeah, to do a proper job of documenting Gabriele's work requires 
some practice.  I try and write the user doc for his pdf maker "in 
pdf maker", and end up just confused enough to not make it work to 
a satisfactory level.  But I'll say, his work deserves to be rewarded 
more than it is currently.

building software is a constant re-engineering process

I was just about to add;  then again (re reward) so does yours, Gregg's 
Sunanda's Ashley's Nenad's Oldes' John's Paul's Henrik's  Maarten's 
.... oh so many.  It's like the entire community is a bunch of under 
appreciated super stars   :)

And mainly due to the size of the user base.  We don't have enough 
hands to use (let alone even try) all the cool nifty stuff that is 
produced.

Even the user.r rebol of the year only has one official nomination 
so far.   :(

who is MIA at present ?

From the nom list I'd like to see?   Doc, Paul, you, Gregg, Sunanda; 
Oldes; BrianH, oh so many that deserve a great big banner of appreciation. 
 Richard; Reichart; (a ton of the Qtask staffers) etc etc etc.

Gee; Gabriele, Ladislav (I think of ten more as soon as I quit typing) 
 :)  Petr, Henrik ...  more, many more.

guys, i have no problems in taking my VID out of R3 if you feel that's 
a problem. just let us know sooner rather than later.

I have not tried your VID3

Gabriele;  ???  NOOO!   Sorry you read my cheerleading that way. 
 I was diss'in me not you.  It was my lame attempt to explain why 
some the VID3 docs aren't up to the snuff that they should be.   
As I've said before ... keep on writing the mondo complex stuff so 
the rest of don't have to.  :)

rest of US don't have to.

Gabriele, I like the ideas behind your VID3 and think that with only 
minor cleanups would be a GUI to brag about.

Hi, I want to create functions where all variables are local without 
declaring them. What is the way to do this currently and  in rebol 
3 ? thanks

I  use this for html blocks that have layout information (tags, strings, 
...) and bind them to a local value of the function creating the 
layout but I don't want to have to declare multiple variables

In general, you don't because it is a maintenance nightmare. Ladislav 
came up some functions to support this kind of thing, though they 
haven't been ported to R3. Do you mean all referenced variables or 
all assigned variables? How would you specify global variables that 
you want to access? Do you want variables set with set statements 
captured too? How about variables set in inner blocks, or parse rules?

I'm a little confused as to what you want to do here - perhaps a 
code snippet would help demonstrate.

all referenced variables. Other variables are passed as arguments

blk: [ <html> <title> tag-title </title> ... tag-x tag-y ...]

inside the function you do bind/copy blk 'local-var

local-var is defined but the other ones, tag-title, tag-x, tag-y 
... I don't want to have to define in /local local-var ...

the bind should probably give an error for variables that are not 
set

All referenced variables would include ones like 'for, 'if and 'and. 
It seems to me that you want an object, not function local variables. 
That would be much easier to do in R3 with the improvements to bind 
but you can do it in R2 as well.

what I am after is in using rebol as a PFL (pure functional language), 
 in which all references are copies. I read something in the wiki 
about a new function keyword which allowed this but couldn't find 
it again in the wiki . Anybody knows this func2 keyword ?

No such thing. You would have to rewrite most of the mezzanines and 
natives to make a practical pure functional REBOL, as almost everything 
causes side effects and aliases. Pure functional languages tend to 
only be efficient when compiled - when interpreted they are dirt 
slow.

You can manually use REBOL as a pure functional language, but it 
will be much slower and have more overhead.

On the other hand, there should be nothing stopping you from making 
a pure functional dialect that compiled to imperative REBOL, and 
the result might be faster than all but the best hand-coded REBOL, 
once you get past the compiler overhead. If you can compile ahead 
of time that won't be much of a problem.

thanks, I am looking for a practical solution that doesn't require 
much work. I've moved away from rebol but I have a lot of legacy 
code i'd like to evolve, if possible

Well, code that is written with aliasing issues in mind tends to 
look pretty much like mostly pure functional code, and function result 
chaining gets rid of a lot of variables. We have been trying to make 
functional programming styles easier in R3 and some of that is getting 
backported to R2 starting with 2.7.6.

Many of the series functions are modifying though, and reassignment 
is used a lot.

is there any doc on the functional programming styles in rebol ? 
thanks

It's 20 days since that last update to Docbase; is that a good sign 
or bad?