World: r4wp

What old answers if you don't have a SO account before?

For completeness I've asked the question about exporting and private

SO didn't previously require you to create an account or even provide 
an email address to answer questions. Since I didn't care about SO, 
I didn't bother to make an account. Now they require an email address, 
and use that email address to determine who you are. Creating an 
account is almost an extra, just a way to give you a nickname and 
profile info.

You need a reputation of at least 20 to use the SO chat system ... 
and with ticks, you're already there.

with 2 ticks

BTW, we are encouraging the use of SO as a help resource for those 
who won't or can't use Altme

Yeah, I found that annoying, but I suppose it makes sense.

Do you want me to edit my answer to include the exporting stuff? 
I can't really do it in a comment since it would be in the same scale 
as the original answer.

Edit the answer would be better

Or ask a separate question.

Also, SO has an API so we can potentially grab all the Rebol tagged 
questions and also host them on rebol.org if we need to.  It's not 
stuck in the SO system

Too late, Andreas, I'm already editing the answer. It makes it easier 
to keep context this way.

Done.

Thanks Brian, good answer!

So, should schemes be isolated?

I've never needed to isolate something, so in general no. Most stuff 
should generally be regular modules or scripts. The rest are special 
cases.

I can imagine that if you want to have a module somehow negitiate 
some passwords and don't want them to leak, or some other security 
issue, you might want to write the module to be isolated. Also, if 
Maxim wanted to port slim to R3, or someone wanted to port Qtask 
(I forgot what it's called now, sorry) or some other code written 
for Gabriele's PowerMezz modules to R3, they might want to use named, 
private isolated modules.

One interesting use of isolated modules is to use IMPORT/no-share 
to force a module to load isolated even if it wasn't written for 
that. This is a way to use modules that are too messily written, 
that make too many unnecessary changes, and try to limit the mess 
a bit.

negitiate -> negotiate

Was there ever a mysql driver for R3? I saw some examples in the 
"import" docs but the link is not working.

There's an ODBC driver for R3, at least on Windows. It emulated R2-like 
port behavior. Can that be used to access mysql?

According to the mysql ref, yes. Thanks for the tip.

However, on linux is easy to ovverride any problem using "call", 
in the end I prefer this way.

Id depends, how fast is CALL, but especially on Linux, there should 
be very little overhead. E.g. I found out, that PHP, for Unicode 
conversions, just calls iconv. If you don't call the function in 
loop, I would go the CALL way, with tiny wrapper parsing results 
back. But - CALL on R3 misses /output and /wait ...

We need some bounty to bring R3 CALL on par with R2 :-)

Maybe we could see what ist stopping Krzysztof from moving on this 
issue (which he mentioned he could work on). Possibly if some of 
the gurus would help him out with some Rebol pointers he could do 
it.

https://github.com/rebol/r3/issues/5

I contacted Krzysztof with this idea in mind.

wait  value  /all

Waits for a duration, port, or both.

Arguments:

value [number! time! port! block! none!] 


Could wait be enhanced to wait for a particular value like unless?

wait [ port zero? word! ]

You mean waiting for a condition, rather than for a port, time or 
duration?

In addition to

Waiting on a block is always "in addition to". I mean, being able 
to wait on a condition changing, as another wait feature. How would 
you want this implemented? We don't have write barriers for words 
(that I know of). WAIT basically works based on signalling events, 
afaik. Would a port scheme for generic signalling completion of a 
task do, as long as it's easy enough to do?

Yes, a port scheme was something I was thinking of

How does wait on a date! work?  is the date checked or is there a 
signal/event produced on change of system date ?

wait does not work with date!, it works with time.

Ah... the documentation is a little misleading then http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/functions/wait.html

The spec is taken from R3, but the docs for this function haven't 
been updated from their R2 equivalents. A problem with a lot of the 
R3 docs, I'm afraid.

Thanks for reporting Graham, fixed.

What is fixed?

The problem in the documentation you reported earlier.

ahh... the old version was caching

I'm getting metaphorically killed by the FOREACH function blowing 
a system assertion 1207 periodically. I'm trying to process a couple 
thousand files and it's dying before it's finished. The script will 
need to be rewritten to call another R3 instance per file, just to 
make sure that it completes.

There's only so much of the process that can be rewritten to uzse 
FORALL. And of course MAP-EACH is getting hit by the same bug.

which build?

Latest from rebolsource, but it also affected alpha 111.

and it's not a memory leak?

I was able to make it last longer by switching some calls from FOREACH 
to FORALL - I figure it's a context allocation bug.

I'm going to switch the rest of the code to non-rebinding loops and 
see if that helps.

Well, that doesn't bode well for long running scrips

Right? Gah!