Re: Rebol - A Messaging Language

Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Sun, 5 Sep 1999 21:38:21 -0400 (EDT)


Some PR flack writes:
> For examples of using REBOL, the Messaging Language, see..... here.

See..... where?

I read about this language when it first came out. My take on it is
that it's Scheme with a few differences:
- you don't need parentheses to delimit operand lists for fixed-arity
operations;
- alists are more convenient to write, and a 'pathname' syntax for using
them is built into the language;
- lists are doubly linked;
- there's a nice library of built-in functionality to do things like
send email and fetch web pages via HTTP;
- it has lots more hype.

All in all, it looks like a really nice language, and it looks like
it'd be fun to program in. But Perl and Python are really nice too,
and they're free software, as are many implementations of Scheme --
some quite good, and some that even compile to native code. I figure,
why waste time with proprietary environments unless I have to?

BTW, I'd like to thank Jeff Bone for recommending Essentials of
Programming Languages a few months back. I got the book and I'm
working through the exercises. It is really a mind-expanding book.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Sat Sep 05 1999
64 days until the Internet stock bubble bursts on Monday, 1999-11-08.
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>