greggirwin

15 ms·

61.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Welcome to Red @Turing_Machine! Baroque is fine for music, but not for tech. :) It's funny how a certain feature will attract people to Red (and its predecessor Rebol), but then you find so much more inside. I was the same way. When I
62.
by greggirwin 9y ago
@badsectoracula's comment resonated with me, and obviously many others. VB was transformative. Since then, people have tried to recreate that magic. Hasn't happened. Other transformative magic has appeared but, to build on what @b
63.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Very little danger, especially to the core language. One scenario is that someone wants to add support for all kinds of features by adding large, external dependencies, thinking it will make Red more marketable. But the language isn't
64.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Sarcasm?
65.
by greggirwin 9y ago
One big problem there is that protocols aren't sitting still in time. As more things change, like moving SMTP to ESMTP, Rebol needed to keep up, but didn't always. R2 was closed source, which didn't help. The protocol schemes
66.
by greggirwin 9y ago
It's OK if they don't go away. We just end up looking better (and having more fun doing so) in comparison. :^)
67.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Wish I could give this comment +10.
68.
by greggirwin 9y ago
GC will come. It just hasn't been needed yet for Red to continue its own development. If you write in Red/System, the C level dialect, you have `free`.
69.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Ah, I see @rebolek noted that as well. He always beats me.
70.
by greggirwin 9y ago
You can see how Red is starting to approach this in http://www.red-lang.org/2017/07/063-macos-gui-backend.html , particularly the Cross Platform GUI Metrics section. It is a really hard problem. Technically it ca
71.
by greggirwin 9y ago
How hard it is all depends on the DSL. I just found another article on HN and whipped one up as an example. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16010971 It's not black magic, by any means, but it's also not
72.
by greggirwin 9y ago
You can pattern match streams of values, and those values can be any lexical form that Red supports.
73.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Correct, though we can't predict the future. If somebody throws huge amounts of money at Red they could influence the language. Then it's up to the team and community to decide if it's worth including, or risking a fork. It
74.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Correct. The grammar is interpreted directly.
75.
by greggirwin 9y ago
You won't find anything quite like it in any other language, and there's a reason for that. Like Lisp, Redbol langs are homoiconic. Rebol was initially designed as a messaging language, and has a lot of datatypes with literal form
76.
by greggirwin 9y ago
We live in interesting times.
77.
by greggirwin 9y ago
@ZenoArrow is correct. Nenad Rakocevic supported himself, with modest donations and other work, until he could raise the initial investment money. He and another full time developer have been working on it for a few years, using those resou
78.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Neither of those features have been a priority, but both will eventually be built in. We'll wait for you. :^)
79.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Thanks for the info @nickpsecurity!
80.
by greggirwin 9y ago
If you follow Red, you know that avoiding complexity is a primary goal. Each new back end may add some complexity, but it doesn't change the underlying model of how Red is implemented. And I think it will be kind of what you say you
81.
by greggirwin 9y ago
It's not an afterthought, but it takes a lot of time and work. The project priorities are driven by the people paying for the work, and it hasn't been a priority for them. We hope the new projects will allow us to improve the situ
82.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Someone mentioned Red in a comment here. Coincidentally, it's a descendant of Rebol, which was designed by Carl Sassenrath, architect of the AmigaOS.
83.
by greggirwin 9y ago
Explicit is different, not better.
84.
by greggirwin 9y ago
I agree. I was sad to see comment support removed from the JSON spec.
85.
by greggirwin 9y ago
That would be a very different format. A big part of the format is that the lexical forms allow you to write things as you normally would, to another human. That does impose limits, but is part of the fundamental design.
86.
by greggirwin 9y ago
No need for special syntax. ^ is already the escape character. Just use blocks. Though a `unit` syntax has been brought up. The notation would use path syntax, but start with an number instead of a word. Frink, of course, is the king of lan
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by greggirwin 9y ago
Thanks! Good to know.
88.
by greggirwin 9y ago
This comment has generated a lot of interest, and rightly so. The thing to remember is that Ren (and JSON) are data exchange formats, not in-memory representations. If you need more control than their numeric syntax supports, metadata is yo
89.
by greggirwin 9y ago
@jepler, 1) Do you agree that a notation should support currency values? That is, they are useful to identify in data, as atomic units? 2) If so, do you agree there should be a single standard symbol and lexical form used to identify them
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by greggirwin 9y ago
Without a clear choice (as an English speaker) as to which might be more exact in translation, I think I pulled 仁 in because it also looks like the opening of a block, which is fundamental in Ren.

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