World: r3wp

It's on rebol.net, so down, but the bookmark I have was

http://www.rebol.net/w/index.php?title=Copy_Semantics&redirect=no

rebol.net is up again, at the moment. In case it is done when you 
try to follow the "copy semantics" link, Yahoo has a copy cached.

down*

Have we had REBOL 3 for 64-bit OS yet?

Don't think so

I ran out of memory using R3 because of a huge map!. I was doing 
a Chinese social-network-graph analysis. If R3 supports 64-bit OS, 
I will have the 64-bit HW, 64-bit OS, and 8 GB RAM  ready. Too much 
data to analysize, too less memory.

interesting :-)

Indeed :-)

Actually, Sharp phone using our Tapas OS (which is based on Android) 
is shipping in China. (http://www.udeek.com/archives/628) I hope 
that R3 with View can be port to android soon.

So I can introduce it to Chinese mobile phone users.

Jerry, have you considered to put your wish to CureCode?

Yes, please! I am glad that someone has finally run into the 32bit 
memory limits in R3 with real code rather than just test code :)

Nevertheless, there may be a problem with a map! hash limit, so, 
I am not sure, that just a simple solution would suffice

We already resolved that problem earlier - maps rehash with a bigger 
limit when they run out of room now. All we need to do is provide 
Carl with an appropriate number of items to hash, where Ladislav 
would know what I mean by appropriate.

R2 would populate the block below with 200 (or so) random values.
R3 populates it with one value replicated 200 times.
Bug, nasty gotcha, or inexplicably elegant feature?

    random/seed now/time/precise
    blk: copy []
    loop 200 [append blk random/secure "abcdefghi"]
    print length? unique blk
    == 1    ;;R3's result (a110)

R3 64-bit wish added to CureCode:
http://www.curecode.org/rebol3/ticket.rsp?id=1785

Sunanda: RANDOM of a series in R3 modifies the series and returns 
a reference to the modified series.

So you append the same series 200 times to blk, and also shuffle 
this series 200 times.

So the behaviour you observe it's just another instance of missing 
COPY" :) `random/secure copy "abcdefghi"` will work as expected.

And yes, that is an incompatible change in R3 over R2. RANDOM in 
R2 was not modifying a series argument.

I expect that it was because we are trying to make R3 more efficient, 
so it is left up to the developer to decide whether a copy is appropriate 
rather than just assuming it is. But yes, incompatible, and without 
a change in function name, just like we rejected for UNIQUE and the 
other set functions. Oh well.

Actually a good example of how arbitrary those "efficiency" decisions 
can become.

As we could also choose to optimise for efficiency of the copying 
RANDOM.

It's not so bad when they are documented, at least in CureCode, but 
that particular change seems to predate CureCode by at least a year. 
And predate PROTECT, hence the bug with that.

I understand that there are limits to how efficient you can make 
copies. Making a copy is itself an inefficiency, since efficiency 
isn't just a CPU thing, memory usage matters too. However, this might 
not work as well when we are making a lot of series non-modifiable 
not just for protection, but in theory to make them sharable without 
conflicts. I'll put my concerns in the ticket.

Can we consider R3 being mature enough, to ask general R3 questions 
here? Or should we setup R3 Core (or Core R3) group?

I tried to look into Rebol Tutorial request for the JS 'prototype 
like functionality:


http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4272018/does-rebol-really-have-an-equivalent-for-javascript-prototype-property

Of course his speed claims are relative. I added some reaction to 
show how to extend objects, but studying JS prototype documentation, 
I wonder if something like that would be possible to simulate using 
REBOL? I know that we can have sub-objects shared/referenced. But 
JS Prototype is not just that - it is not about classes. It is more 
about the ability to have linked objects, and when querying a value, 
it is being looked-up down the road:

obj/value 


If 'value is not found in the object, then JS looks down to obj/prototype/value. 
And 'prototype here can be referenced from different constructor. 
I think, that it is similar to find/deep, but with simple/single 
accessor.

More is here - http://mckoss.com/jscript/object.htm

Generally I remember two enhancement requests in REBOL:


- find/first - from the list of objects find first one matching the 
query

- find/deep - look-up in nested structures. Most probably blocks 
were meant, so not sure it would work for objects ...

Any ideas if some enhancement request would be helpful (e.g. to allow 
JS 'prototype simulation) in that regard, to get us more flexibility? 
I am more interested in practical usefullness, than in some over-complicated 
object/class system ....

I wonder what is difficult to simulate on the JS prototyping? IMO 
it is possible to do it easily in REBOL.

Why do you bother to try to help Tutorial translate a non-working 
code example?

It is working example.

OK, but then it is a trivial example, as I see it

the only problem in R2 is the extension of prototype object  for 
new fields imo

this is not worth discussing (I do not use JS at all, using only 
Java from time to time), but where did he use that in his code?

He is just imo trying to say, that rebol is incapable crap, as he 
does most of the time ...

I think that in REBOL we are not able to use path accessors to get 
redirected to prototype subobject. Other than that, with special 
accessors, it might be possible ...

Where in his original code did he do such a thing?

I guess, that the main difference which he is showing is, that in 
REBOL we must specify field names, like:
person: context [
	firstName: secondName: none
	whoAreYou: does [print [firstName secondName]]
	WhatIsYourSex: does [print sex]
]
extend person 'sex "male"
JaneDoe: make person [firstName: "Jane" secondName: "Doe"]
JaneDoe/whoAreYou
JaneDoe/WhatIsYourSex
ask "Are you sure?"
JaneDoe/sex: "female"
JaneDoe/WhatIsYourSex

Is that what he is requesting? We can implement semantically equivalent 
code in REBOL, but that exact code can't be made to work.

I don't know what he is requesting.

It's just the only difference I can see.

We can implement semantically equivalent code in REBOL, but that 
exact code can't be made to work.

 - I do not understand - that code works, what does "that exact code 
 can't be made to work" mean?

It looks like a question, based on the object model of JavaScript. 
REBOL objects don't have "children" in that way, as we don't do delegation, 
just prototyping.

WhatIsYourSex has a function that is bound to the object *before* 
the word 'sex is added to it, so the 'sex it is getting is not person/sex. 
It only works for objects derived from it. Unless I missed Oldes' 
point, and only working in derived objects was intended.

Of course this has no sense even in the JS version. The only difference 
is, that JS would return undefined, REBOL throw an error. The second 
is better for me.

OK, so, generally - a nonsense, that actually works the way he wants 
it to, so what?