World: r3wp

Isn't it enough to just make it behave like View?

I hope so

There will always be subtle differences, though, so like Red, it 
won't be fully compatible

View is events, basic graphics structure, DRAW and window handling, 
as I see it.

All that except DRAW is done by SDL. For extra functionality, there 
are many libraries

This is what I want to make:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nA4WaJTc7Y&NR=1

GEOS on C64 is much better :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Mnvead8Tc

Support for functions with variable number of arguments just released.

New attribute 'variadic documentation: http://static.red-lang.org/red-system-specs.html#section-6.3.3

New attribute 'typeinfo documentation: http://static.red-lang.org/red-system-specs.html#section-6.3.4

'typeinfo is a variant of 'variadic that provides also argument type 
at runtime.

Shouldn't that be type-info?

Endo, it's in development

I want attributes to be single words, so as callback is also wrote 
without an hyphen, I decided to do the same for typeinfo.

I might change 'typeinfo to 'type or 'info only, but these words 
alone are too common, so, not enough accurate.

If someone has a better proposition for 'typeinfo, I am ready to 
replace it.

Callback is written like that in English (otherwise it would be a 
verb instead of a noun), but type info is written as two words

TYPED would also do

TYPED sounds good, based on a glance at the docs.

I can now draw a pixel on an SDL screen in a format of 32 bits per 
pixel

Humble beginnings, but I've had a series of issues already

Getting the basics working is sometimes the hardest part.

I had TYPED in my short-list, so I guess it would be a better choice 
for a single word.

Now that variable arguments and RTTI are available, I have re-designed 
the basic screen printing functions. I have inserted a _ character 
in front of all PRIN-* functions, as they should not be used anymore 
in the general case (I might drop them completly later if they are 
not useful anymore). 


Before releasing it, I would like to get some feedback first. Now 
only the polymorphic PRINT and PRINT-WS (inserting spaces) functions 
should be needed. LF, CR, TAB, SPACE have been declared, so can be 
freely used in print blocks (or anywhere else). Variadic and typed 
functions have now a relaxed syntax, allowing to pass a single argument 
without enclosing [ ] brackets.

PRINT: print one or several arguments one after each other.

PRINT-WS: print one or several arguments, inserting a space character 
between each arguments.

Here how it looks now:

* printing without newline

    print "hello"
    print 123
    print ["hello" 123 tab "world"]

* printing with newline

    print ["hello" lf]
    print [123 lf]
    print ["hello" 123 tab "world" lf]

* printing with space inserted

    print-ws ["hello" 123 "world"]
    print-ws ["hello" 123 tab "world" lf]

Very nice. This takes Red/System a step beyond C

The only thing I'm not wild about is the print-ws name. Do you think 
something like print-wide would be too long?

Well I consider PRINT-WS already too long, but -WIDE is nicer, so 
it might be a good alternative.

I use a lot of PRIN-* functions every day for debugging purpose, 
so this new, much more powerful PRINT alternative, will save me a 
few hundred keystrokes each day (just not having to type PRIN NEWLINE 
anymore makes me happy). :-)

:-) It also reads a lot more elegant

Indeed.

In PureBasic, there are Print and PrintN functions. PrintN adds new-line 
to the end.
For Print-ws, what about Print-Form ?

we can use PrintN for single argument: PrintN "Hello" --> Print ["Hello" 
lf]

I considered PRINT-FORM but I've found it not meaningful enough. 
PRINT-WIDE is a better hint at what the function does.

I will publish these changes tomorrow morning and will bump the version 
number, as they would break most of existing scripts. I will write 
a blog entry to describe the changes.

Did you do any performance improvements? I just updated after a bit 
over a month and my SDL test, drawing a gradient, is a lot faster 
:-)

I wonder why we use lf, instead of a newline. Then we add a description 
to the doc, something like lf adds a newline :-)

LF is shorter, and newline was already defined

Did you do any performance improvements?

 I did a few small code optimizations, but they should not have noticeable 
 effects. Maybe your code relies on a tight loop that benefited from 
 them?

btw - what's the resolution re floating support in Red/System? Kaj 
is now trying to port SDL, so I wonder if for the gfx (which was 
not planned to be the RED's target),it will be the necessity,or not?

Floating point support will come to Red/System when the float! Red 
datatype will be implemented.

And float is planned, right?

Of course, there is just a lot of other feature that are much higher 
in priority.

features

Basic SDL does not require floats yet, so I have some room left to 
grow :-)

What's becoming a problem first is the lack of 16 bits integers. 
They're in structs and arrays, so I have to do trickery now to access 
them

Maybe I imagined the speed improvement. My previous experiments were 
the night before, and I don't have those executables anymore

Will Arduino support bring us an ARM support? Hmm, maybe not - it 
seems to be an Atmel, not ARM?

The small Arduinos are AVR, the bigger Netduinos are ARM

The first embryonic support for both is already done, if I'm not 
mistaken