What about REBOL (www.rebol.com)

[William Tanksley]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 03:20:51 GMT, Jayr Magave wrote:
>Sorry to introduce a strange subject to this group. Please, no flames.
>In fact, it isn't really strange -- I woul like to know if someone evaluated
>the new script language REBOL. It looked very powerful and high level to me.
>But lacks library support (specially database support).

Actually, I thought the nicest thing about it was its library support.  I
especially like how well thought out the libraries are -- they tend to
make their own syntax appropriate to the problem at hand, so solutions
drawn up using them tend to be rather transparent.

On the other hand, the language itself lacks expression delimiters.  This
makes complex expressions trippy -- it's hard to tell when you're calling
a function and when you're getting the value of a variable.  Functions
which take multiple parameters look _really_ odd.

For instance, here's a nasty Rebolism:

print sum 3 sum sum 6 7 4 5

How many arguments does 'sum' take?  What will this print?

Of course, the practical answer to this problem is "so don't do that".  If
you take up coding Rebol I'm certain that you'll find it reasonably easy
to stop yourself whenever you're tempted to solve a problem that way ;-).

>I am about to take my time to learn an useful multiplataform script language
>and Python looked very fine,  until I took a look at REBOL.

Ideally, Python will continue to look fine.  Rebol's a very nice language,
but so's Python.

Heck, not even discovering Joy
(http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/philosophy/phimvt/j00syn.html), surely the
best language ever designed, has not sullied my happiness with Python.

(If you're looking for a useful scripting language, don't bother -- Joy's
pretty primitive in that respect.  However, if you want a really cool
programming language which will make you wish you'd discovered it before
you'd ever heard the word "lambda" -- read the pages NOW.  The best
algebraic introduction to a language I've EVER seen, and the simplest
proofs.)

Am I sick, or what?

>Jayr Magave

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley, in hoc signo hack