World: r3wp

Maps are used most often as a variant of the object type with slightly 
different behavior (mentioned by Robert above).

Maybe it's just because I'm spoiled by case-sensitive languages and 
operating systems, but I can't see how case-insensitive strings are 
ever useful.

I would mostly use a map! as a hashtable

BrianH can vectors be made extendable, shrinkable?

would be nice to append beyond the end of a vector but I guess that 
would defeat it, correct?

Sorry, REBOL is case-insensitive by default in almost all cases. 
Something to get used to. At least R3 is case-preserving for words.

Paul, as vectors are supposed to be contiguous regions of memory, 
it would be possible, but appending would either be _very_ slow in 
general or of unpredictable preformance at the cose of increased 
memory usage

Brian, I don't have any issues with REBOL being case insensitive

But my filesystem simply is not, for example

Yeah that is what I thought.  I didn't think it would be possible 
without rebuilding the vector to some extent.

Also, it would depend on whether the dimensions of a vector are considered 
part of their definition. And that would break multidimensional vectors, 
which are still planned.

ok thanks.

And if I want to use filenames as keys, I already need to do `to-binary 
to-string`

You can use filenames as keys as-is, if your code is portable.

No, I can't

Portability has nothing to do with it :)

Ah, your code must not be portable - if it was then you couldn't 
be using filenames that differed only by case.

Let's say I write a script that displays the number of files in all 
current subdirectories

Let's say I want to store those numbers in a map! associating the 
subdirectory name with the count of files

Perfectly portable code, but fails on case-sensitive filesystems

Yeah can't use different case names in map.

Right. Case-sensitive filesystems aren't portable to the main client 
OS'es, or even all server OS'es.

This is why portable use of those filesystems tends to not use filenames 
that only differ by case.

Yes, but that is totally besides the point

There is perfectly portable code that can work as expected both with 
case-sensitive and case-insensitive filesystems

But to write such code in R3, we _can not_ use filename as map! keys 
as-is

There is a way around that on windows I think.

Just collected the short name for all the files using dir/x and then 
you can create a map for all of them.

non-posix ntfs is case insensitive anyway, so it's not really an 
issue on most windows systems

the workaround to write portable rebol code in this situation is 
either not using map! or transcoding the file! keys to binary!

yeah that should work.

Yeah, on Windows the filesystems are case-preserving, not case-sensitive. 
You can mount a filesystem as case-sensitive, but most programs will 
fail when using such files. And most modern Windows don't use short-names, 
since that limits the number of files that a directory can hold.

On Win9x there were always short-names, but on NTFS its an option.

you just use dir/x on NTFS

No, I mean it's an option at filesystem creation time, and a rarely 
chosen option at that nowadays.

It's not an issue on OSX most of the time either since they act case-preserving 
too, afaik.

no rebcode in R3?

No rebcode in R3. Rebcode got its speed from certain tricks that 
don't work as well in R3 due to the changes in the context model. 
However, you can make your ow3n rebcode as an extension if you like 
(one of my pending projects).

Cool Brian.

It won't likely be compatible though - I'm planning to make a more 
REBOL-like dialect. A compatible dialect would be slow.

Yeah was looking for the speed.

It should even be easier with the changes to the command! type that 
are to be upcoming with the new host kit.

what is the command type?

Also can you tell me how to use tasks?

Also can you tell me how to use tasks?

A command is the type of function that you currently use to access 
extensions. Soon it will be more.

Tasks currently don't work.

they do something.

But that something isn't currently multitasking. What they currently 
do is crash REBOL :(

>> do b
Begin Task
End Task>>