World: r4wp

'm offering a matching funds drive to for Kaj and Esper Consultancy's 
work on Red.  I'll match funds donated to them by January 31, 2013, 
up to a total of $200.  If you're interested in Red, please help 
them devote some additional time and effort to this project.

Fast forwarding Red history: http://www.red-lang.org/2013/01/fast-forwarding-red-history.html

Cool :-)

Very good vid even without a fitting musical distraction! 

Today I watched a tutorial for the AVR Dragon, a kind of arduino 
thing, when I heard in that video the programming environment was 
a download of about 500MB and needed the .NET framework I stopped 
it and realised that would be about 5000 times bigger than the programmable 
memory of that board. That is why the world needs Red :)

If someone wants to add music, he can make a new video using gource 
and add appropriate music, I hadn't the time to  also work on the 
audio part. :-)

amazing!

wow!

Wow that's cool :)

I find graphical representations of data very interesting.  This 
one is one of those!

I can't wait to see how that video progresses as more people become 
involved!

The paypal address for Kaj and Esper Consultancy is [bas-:-esperconsultancy-:-nl]

Doc - thanks for mentioning me, now I am famous again :-) Well, glad 
that as I can't program, I can be kind of usefull otherwise :-)

Donations are currently vital for Red continuation as it is my only 
revenue stream. Without all the donations I have received, Red progress 
would slowdown a lot. So, it is probably even more important than 
contributing code. ;-)

Doc, Issue! in Red will be Any-String! (like in R2) or Any-Word! 
(like in R3) ?

Good question: I am just about to add issue! support to Red today. 
I think the change in R3 to treat it as a word is a good one, as 
the main issue! usage is for keywords. As in R3, it will allow digits 
as first character.

I'm doubtful about it, as it is also commonly used to denote bug 
numbers and such, which is now expensive in R3

Hmm, why is that expensive now?

Each issue number adds a word to the word registry, that isn't garbage 
collected like strings are

I would like to be proven wrong

No that's true. But I wouldn't consider that particularly expensive 
(esp not with R3 effectively abandoning the word limit).

For compiled Red, I think this would not matter at all (as strings 
are interned as well, afaik).

As I mentioned in Rebol School (and elsewhere earlier), issues can 
be made to behave like strings to a certain extent even if they're 
words. To do that in compiled code you'd need to keep their spellings 
around though, unless you resolve all of those function calls statically 
(which you would be able to because issues would be immutable).

Having issues be immutable and unique could lead to lower memory 
usage, Kaj. Sure, you wouldn't be able to garbage collect them, but 
additional copies of the same issue wouldn't add any additional memory. 
Plus, you can't necessarily GC strings either - only when you don't 
need to keep references to them anymore. It may depend on the app 
whether it's more efficient to have issues be strings or words.

Symbols are structs in the Red runtime. If you have an app server 
running that handles issue!s, it will accumulate memory over time 
that you can't collect. It will be indistinghuishable from a memory 
leak

You could even use it for a DoS attack

Same with other word types, of course.

True, but that's not a good reason to increase the problem

If you think about what you'd have to do to secure a server from 
memory overload, it would be reasonable to limit acceptable words 
to a certain dictionary, but it wouldn't be reasonable to limit issue! 
to a small range

All in all, I feel that the nature of issue! is not the same as the 
nature of word!

As programmers, we usually see forms such as #if and think it's a 
REBOL issue!, but that's not how it is used in common English

They're not used at all in common english. You see them in Twitter-speak 
though.

Very sharp ;)

I think Kaj rather meant the name "issue", not the syntactical form 
(#...).

(And I think we also had discussion about renaming the R3 type to 
e.g. keyword!.)

Surely in English people write #1, #2 and such?

Twitter certainly didn't invent them :-)

literaly, it reads as 'number'  it music it reads as 'sharp'  any 
other use isn't from proper english afaik.

(in music)

Yes, in Dutch, we write nr. like no. in other languages

In business correspondence it can mean number, in Twitter speak it's 
a hashtag, in music it means someone wrote a sharp with the wrong 
character. In English, it's a symbol that means pound (the weight, 
not the currency), but it's not common anymore.

In American English, that is :)

I think it only precedes a word when it means number, or is in Twitter-speak.

It doesn't really mean pound; English keyboards have a pound sign 
(the currency, which is the weight of silver) where # is on American 
keyboards

It means pound on American keyboards. Maybe they don't use the character 
for that in England. We just use lb here now.

UK keyboards also have the "#" character. And  it's unshifted so 
it's more convenient than some other chars, such as "@" or "&" -- 
they are shifted on UK layouts
# is called hash over here.

Kaj: "Surely in English people write #1, #2 and such?" Certiainly 
not. An English person would never write that. An American would.

Kaj: I share your security concerns about an appserver, but I don't 
think that other words datatypes can really be more secure. As long 
as you can force the LOADing of arbitrary input strings (without 
even evaluating the code), you could use it to make the symbol table 
blow up the memory.

Peter, OK, but that's where issue! comes from

Doc, my point is that one would be more likely to screen for limited 
word use than limited issue! use

Would it be possible to have a recycle feature for the symbols registry?