World: r3wp

It's outrageous! :)

I need to get things done, and get things rolling, so I won't answer 
any more questions at this point. You get the last countdown tomorrow, 
and the intro and being able to try it out yourself in 2 days, if 
all goes well.

Again thanks for the interest! And remember to have fun!

Sorry, I missed that. So it's a VLIW VM, like Itanium. Not quite 
the same thing as Lua at all. So we should believe him when he says 
"I have only done very little in compiler optimisation", but at least 
we don't have to worry too much about running out of opcode space.

This seems like it's made for big hardware. Interesting :)

No, it has nothing to do with VLIW except large insn size.

VLIW definitely was not invented to hold larger immediates :)

So it's big iron RISC then :)

Carl's partly open source model hasn't worked in attracting users 
and generating an incom stream for him .. why do you think yours 
will ?  ( for the FAQ )

I wonder how well the book sales idea would work. A side-effect benefit 
of that is good documentation for the language and some marketing.

Carl did that for the 2.3 core user manual but never had any updates 
to it.

I just paid for the ebook Programming with Clojure ... and that' 
s an open source lanaguage

:)

Like I said, when World is version 1 and I have written a good manual, 
it may make good sense to fully open source it.

The book I bought is not by the language author!

So if I open source it now, someone else could write the docs and 
benefit from it financially. Where would that leave me? :)

Like I was telling you earlier, Graham, you can't just open source 
something without considering the business model. Otherwise you're 
just giving away your work without it being sustainable.

In this case, the big iron aspects of this language could lead to 
some interesting potential applications. Big numbers work can be 
really useful.

Another nice change to REBOL for sure, where we unfortunately never 
got 64-bit builds.

To really use as much memory as we need. We hit the R2 memory limit 
already with one of our apps.

does binding work similarly to REBOL?  I mean can World support current 
advanced REBOL block binding/building for generating code like Parse 
compilers or such oddities like this:
>> reduce [ word word word ]
== [1 2 3]

I'll address that after release.

single level Mark and Sweep GC?  or did you put a bit of time into 
making it a bit more powerful (multi-zone, multi-level, multi-threaded, 
etc.) ?

World doesn't use garbage collection, but reference counting.

@Geomol .... it leaves you famous :)

Open source doesn't mean it's not copyrighted

I'm afraid of being famous. ;)

Write the book now :)

I'll do my best! I promise that.

The nice thing about the book I bought is that I can report errata 
directly from the pdf ... click on errata and it takes me to a web 
form

And the PDF has my name embedded in it ..

And of course if it becomes popular you can do a second edition ;)

ANSI World ... oh no, a fully standardized Earth.

Maybe Max can port glass to it !

it would have to be open source   ;-P

That's the rub ... a single person can only do so much.  And few 
people these days will contribute to a closed source project

(No whining here, use the Vent group!) ;)

its more like I want to link my C version of liquid rather than use 
an interpreted one.  the speed/memory impact is tremendous (10 million 
node allocations a second on the latest early prototype).

btw, wrt the licensing issues... if it may help you, one thing I 
can say is that you will never make (real) money from a programming 
language itself.

once the language actually works, here are possible money making 
potentials:

-the tools which go around it  (frameworks, IDE, etc).

-integrated modules, individual or sets.


-consulting services & adapting the language and its tools for specific 
(high-profile) clients.


-corporate funding by a company , university or research institute 
which uses the language in core components and wants to make sure 
the language stays alive.

-apps/web sites you build with the language.

-donations from enthusiasts (many apps live solely on this!).

Thanks for all your work on World, and the QA John. It's very exciting.


As far as the outrageous bytecode size, from one who hates bloat 
as much as the rest of you here, I am happy to make certain tradeoffs 
in return for other benefits. If I have the choice of REBOL, World, 
Red, and Topaz as "mindset compatible" languages, I can choose which 
one to use for a given purpose. Yes, that opens up other questions 
and issues, but I'm happy to see more REBOL-like langauges.

John, on range! values, do you envision transparent iteration/lazy 
generation support for them? I use the term 'bounds for what you 
call range! and my 'range is a series with the values filled in (with 
/skip support).

I'd really like to see such a combination, a fully working glass 
with a "compiled" rebol clone .. I just have too many performance 
issues with what we have at present.  It may be fast to write .... 
but ...

Thaks for the kind words, Gregg. I was very much in doubt when growing 
the instruction size to 256 bit, but I must do something right, as 
the performance shows. This is an alpha, and things will change. 
And I haven't done much compiler optimization.

*Thanks*

About range!, I haven't thought of what you describe. We can talk 
more about it, when you're able to try World.

btw, I really like the   call-by-word   idea you show in countdown: 
 2

I think the range datatype should be tweaked a little:
 block/4-3
should return.
== [d c]
 

otherwise  it becomes mightily confusing, since as you have it now, 
when going backwards, its 0 based and going forwards its 1 based.


also,   /4-4 and /4-3 shoudn't return blocks of the same length, 
its almost impossible to compute ranges since we'll have to add IF 
to know if the start and end are the same, and then decrement them 
by 2 instead of one, for example... pretty odd.

I'm not sure about that either Max. We'll let John catch his breath 
and he may have a reason.

World alpha has been released.

Who's the first one to successfully run a test?

Well, I ran the test and just created a function. I love the automatic 
quotes by the way.

I just renamed to exe, tried to run from Total Commander, and got 
the following error:

The NTVDM CPU has encountered an illegal instruction ....

Ok. Others got the same error? Anyone has an idea why?