Re: Rebol port question

["Timothy Rue" <timrue@mindspring.com>]

On 04-Oct-98 17:59:20 CA Wright <caw107@york.ac.uk> wrote:
>On 3 Oct 1998, Timothy Rue wrote:

>> How do you get Rebol to recognize an applications arexx port as a rebol
>> addressible (send/write) port?

>As far as I can tell from the docs (I've not yet managed to get the lha to
>decompress on my system yet) this can be accomplished by means of a pipe.

>Write your Rebol script to output to a file (open one with the PIPE:
>device) and then write an Arexx script to pull info from this file and
>send it to an application.

I thought of this too.

>Incorporating Arexx support directly into Rebol would defeat the platform
>independancy.

On the other hand, Carl did mention on #MAE98 that version two will have
this ability, as many seem to want it. There is much more in the works for
version 2.

As far as breaking from platform independance, not really, all that is
happening is the making use of what messaging ports are available on the
different platforms. See it as nothing more than accessing message ports.

Each system has there own methods of application APIs for messaging.

As the VIC has been defined, it's to be consistant across platforms but
not limited in such a way to prevent users from making use of the
advantages of specific systems power.

This thought applies even to systems of the same platform in that with the
concept of "messaging", such rebol scripts will be written that must have
specific third part software to run. Simply exchange the word software
with hardware in the previous sentence to see that the only thing needing
to be platform independant is the builtin, not the user dictionaries.

I realize that one of the objective REBOL Inc. has is to incorporate as
much in rebol that they can. This is the only way to work towards having
more in the way of system independant rebol applications. It is also where
rebol (being that the core is to always be free) will make money in sales.
You can buy rebol now for $29.00 but what you are really buying is the
physical manual and other benefits of becomming part on the "alliance" (no
real difference to what I have communicated about the VIC in regards to
it's freeware status - yet still having a way for earning from what is
built upon this base).

But what this means is:

*There is a hell of alot of work to do in adding these things to rebol,
perhaps unending in realizing things change, new things (SW & HW) come
along from others.

*The inhouse rebol development team cannot really hope to keep up with
what all applications come from others. No matter how big they get in body
count (end users will always outnumber them). Trying to do so can be
viewed as an act of applying or attemting to apply IP control/greed over
what others do (in using their minds).

*There is no reason why to limit Rebols messaging to only rebol
applications. Doing so is a contridiction of what freedom rebol is
communicated to be about. This constraining direction would also limit the
potential growth of rebol use. Especially on the Amiga where there is
already a large base of Amiga applications having a user oriented arexx
port. In essence, to go this direction of rebol only communicating to
rebol applications, would be the act of closed system mentality yet promo
of being of an open system nature. It'd be an outright lie no better than
what MS has communicated in their use of the term "open system".

Just because rebol can handle any text based and binary based data,
doesn't mean it's open. Currently it is not open and won't be until, in the
spirit of rebol, there is an easy way for the user to message
applications regardless of how a system is set up to deal with messaging
between applications (perhaps and likely thru some concept of providing
the basic, but easy to use, elements that allow a user to define ports.)
Currently Arexx is more open than rebol. However, as I understand it, v2
will be better at this. We'll see!

The rock and a hard place here is to avoid placing constraints on the
users but in doing so not undermine the ability to generate income for
REBOL Inc. Perhaps due this rock and a hard place, the end user will never
be given complete freedom. I.E. At what version of rebol will I have the
needed functionality to write the VIC? -> I.E. As far as i can tell right
now, the pattern matching functionality in rebol that is user accessible,
is less in wild card abilities than what AmigaDOS or unix type systems
have. (In IQ I use rexxtricks.library to access the pattern matching
wildcards of AmigaDOS and I have another little app that turns "*" on in
AmigaDos.)



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