World: r3wp

so what's the difference between divergence and deviation.... I am 
straying from the question... I disgress..     ;-)

deviation has a statistical meaning

true

My latin is rusty, but I think that deviate means to go in a different 
direction, while diverge means to branch.

how about "wanda" ... that's a noune

So divergence is more accurate than deviation in this case. (I'll 
try to keep the spelling under control.)

or, 'away

And deviation is in relation to a "norm".

we can play this game all day

Deviation is relative to a norm only for statistics.

Also for law or sociodynamics.

with the statistics use of deviation brought to light ... I revert 
to divergence.  its a more unique term.

You deviate from a contract, you deviate from social rules, the right 
path, etc.

rebolers are all deviants.

On a good day :)

equal? a b

diverge? a b

I missed a lot of this conversation, but saw some mention of NAN 
and INF.  Exceptions by default seem like the natural choice.  Anything 
different could be done with refinements.  divide/symbolic 1 0 ... 
or something?

That is what I was saying about ? in REBOL before. EQUAL? is short 
for EQUIVALENT, and DIVERGE? would be short fot DIVERGENCE. It's 
nonsense in English, but English is just the base language for REBOL 
function names.

Problem with `diverge?` is that the proposed function will not return 
a boolean, unlike equal?.

Or INDEX?, LENGTH?, SUFFIX?, ...

It returns the first series at the point of divergence.

Yeah, those always have been ill-conceived names.

exactly what I was pointing out earlier.    index, length suffix 
should have their ?  dropped.

Fork, the Inf and NaN discussion has moved to CC bug#1717.

And use -of instead. But that's another discussion.

It's just that I would not repeat that mistake when introducing new 
names.

Make that point in bug#1719, where Carl can see it. He tends to let 
us play out these discussions on our own.

I notice that the disarm stub function which was useful for running 
code written to work in R2 under R3 is not included in A109. Is this 
by design?

Yes, Peter. It was intentionally removed in A108 (cf. http://www.curecode.org/rebol3/ticket.rsp?id=1508)

A small gotcha for people who want to write scripts that run under 
both R2 and R3.

One of many, I fear. We should probably start an "Incompatible changes" 
page on the wiki and collect them.

I'm still not sure this specific stub should be removed.  it will 
invalidate *many* R2 scripts and its not such a big thing to leave... 
as long as it prints out a warning.

it could actually be part of a "compatibility" mode switch.... something 
like a delayed module which only need to import when running r2 code.

The other way round is an option as well.

We can collect all of those in an "r3-backward" module.

(Ignore that. Reading comprehension failed me :)

yes exactly.  an r2-compatibility module

That is a better plan than leaving these anachronisms in R3 by default 
:)

but we need to make sure we collect them all (I gather you've been 
a pack rat about this ;-)>

There are some things that we won't be able to replicate, like evaluation 
rules.

So it'll be more like an R3/Backward :)

I expect that with the R2/Forward additions to R2 there might be 
a useful middle ground.

is import expected for R2/forward?  even if its just for non dll 
stuff?

Yes, as an addon (not part of R2 by default). I wanted to wait for 
the model to be set first, and now (for a110) it will be.

cool.  that is the biggest issue I have now when trying to run simple 
R3 stuff in R2.

yes... I am using modules  :-)

I assumed so, but it's nice to hear that you are using R3 modules 
:)

(a classic case of.... if you can't convince them... use the stuff 
they put all those hours on... its probably better than yours  ;-)

hours -> weeks, months?