World: r4wp

Are aliases used (semantically) in Red the same as they are in Rebol?

I'll have to keep alias names prefixed. We'll see if I can keep that 
from leaking through in dialects

Aliases in Red/System are names for C-like structs. It's quite a 
different concept as anything that would be called an alias in REBOL

Aliases in REBOL are for words only.

In Red, I'm not sure that I will implement ALIAS support (as in REBOL), 
it seems that's a feature that has been very rarely used since the 
beginning of REBOL.

I think it needed to be in there because Amiga DOS has it :-)

Good old AmigaDOS. :-)

From the R3 documentation:

Aliases are special because they work at the symbol table level, 
allowing them to be used for refinements and dialect words as well.

So it would be the only way to translate refinements and such

I think Jerry will want that :-)

It will answer Chinese people's question of "Why not Python"

I'm not sure ALIAS could be implemented in Red, we'll see, if it's 
not costly, I'll add it.

I'm interested in making a Red dictionary that will allow people 
to program in Frisian :-)

Now that non-English languages are up-and-coming in programming, 
it could solve the fragmentation of the available code pool, if you 
would implement an extra feature that would allow code to be saved 
and loaded with an ordered list of preferred alias languages

Just write a parser that calls Google Translate and does in place 
substitution.

The results could be hillarious.

They would

I actually had to do something like that once, a configuration file 
contained a bunch of strings in english and they needed them in spanish 
but weren't willing to actually get someone to translate them. So.. 
I used Google Translate.

Did they actually use the result? :-)

Of course!

Legal told them they needed Spanish, but metrics told them no one 
used the Spanish site. So it just had to be sorta right.

And that was maybe 5 years ago, so I'm sure Google Translate is better 
than it was. A context free dictionary conversion from one word to 
another in a different language would probably not give the desired 
result.

Our crown prince got himself in trouble at a speech in Mexico, for 
the only reason that our crown princess, and probably by extension 
his translators, are Argentinian and a certain Spanish word meant 
something else in Mexico than it does in Argentina :-)

(Unless you just mean keywords, with predictable meanings.)

Ah yes, I learned some Spanish from an Argentinian friend, the results 
when speaking to Mexican or Puerto Ricans were.. embarassing.

:-)

Spanish dialects are a bit more intense than English ones it seems. 
English dialets tend to be unintelligable, very few words mean something 
offensive to others.

Hm, there are several words that change to embarassing between English 
and Dutch

English is closer to Dutch than say German, but had been seperated 
for so long that I can imagine the drift meaning, not just pronunciation, 
is significant.

Afrikaans is an offshoot of Dutch and they seem to have incorporated 
a lot of interesting slang.

Yes, there are also such cases between Dutch and German :-)

Question about Red, as I understand it, the Parser and Compiler are 
written in REBOL, but the Runtime is written in Red?

Just going from the source code I can see on GitHub

Really nice website (red-lang.org) by the way.

Kaj: your two new issues have been fixed, let me know if it works 
fine with your code now.

I just saw it happening. :-) Thanks!

Anthony, the current runtime is written in Red/System, to be precise

The parser and compiler will be rewritten in Red once it's ready

And Red/System is a subset/simplification of Red?

I think Red is built on top of Red/System, which is meant to have 
C-like performance. Red/System can also be inlined in Red code.

Hi Henrik, BrianH requested you (or your automated system) invite 
me, I don't know if we've actually spoken before.

That makes Red/System sound like a VM

We probably haven't. :-)

I better let someone more experienced with Red answer that one, before 
I screw something up. :-)

I just ask a lot of questions. Especially right now, since I'm fumbling 
along building my first programming language.

ACook: you can see Red/System as a human-friendly VM if you want. 
;-) But it's more than that, because it allows you to access very 
low-level system or hardware features directly.

Does it do platform abstraction for those low level features, or 
are they platform dependent?

It does abstract everything that can be abstracted, currently, IIRC, 
only FPU options (system/fpu/* properties) are platform-specific.

One thing I'm torn on when it comes to VMs is if I need to write 
my own at all. I know I will have to write a Bootstrapping language 
as an intermediary, but I'm thinking it might be a waste of time 
when LLVM has such aggressive optimization for compilation and also 
supports JIT - both of which I'd have to write myself otherwise.