[steel]

Thank you ! SLiM seems to be a very important tool helping Rebol developers to share their work more professionally. However, I confess I still do not well understand what problem SLiM is trying to solve... I believe you have created a universal object wrapper tool with friendly syntax. SLiM's chief purpose is to avoid namespace confusion among any programs loaded, especially unknown ones. Please can someone provide a concise[dummies/executive] guide to explain better why SliM exists? What is the problem/solution domain? ...with illustrative use-case examples if possible. thanks - Jason

that's one of its chief missions.

I know, its a little hard to explain too, without too much examples laying around. I'm working on that. Think of slim as a .dll or .so loader and management tool, but for rebol code. I know you can 'DO code but then you can't manage it. if a tool creator uses a certain terminology with conflicts then you are forced to recode stuff. If he releases a newer version, then any change you made is then lost.... I know how frustrating it is as I just had to do that with an application I am adding functionality too, but I am not the main author...

And to reuse any changes you want to bring to external interfaces.. without any amount of code change. IT actually frees api and developers the task of trying to find universaly unique names... It empowers the USERS of that api, the chance to adapt IT to THEIR code, instead of the opposite. I can see many new features being added to slim. I have an idea on how to encompass the file i/o functions to properly TRAP all disk access, but that kind of thing takes time to implement and only user demand can push it, until I have time to get to it, on my time. Anyone help on slim (asking for features/implenting/fixing ) is gladly accepted.

I'm working on it. When forge comes of age, slim will be fully integrated. also note that SLIM is a tool and an API, but its the actual API I'd like to be a standard. if we all package our code in the same way, then we can "EXPECT" it to be in a certain form. slim's api is EXTREMELY simple, yet with a little tool added over it, it becomes very easy to create large toolsets with linked files and data. GLASS is the perfect target for such a thing, it was always meant to use a tool like slim. GLASS, as a public release is still long away, but it will use slim's capabilities fully.

ASAP. I'll mainly try to convert all the steel libraries into slim format... and then give examples using them. thanks for the feedback. -MAx ---------<