Red Programming Language Google Group

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

arnoldv...@gmail.com (Arnold) — Sat, 18 May 2013 18:27:31 UT

Hi guys,

That is a pretty awesome summation on the status of Red at the moment
Peter, Gerard and Gregg!
Soon Sod will be allknowing besides being almighty as well.

Regards,

Arnold

2013/5/18 Gregg Irwin <gr...@pointillistic.com>

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

gr...@pointillistic.com (Gregg Irwin) — Sat, 18 May 2013 18:09:31 UT

SA> I'm still not clear on the difference.

Red is like REBOL. It has an interpreter. In addition, it also has a
compiler. It is a high level language with automatic memory management
and such. There is no GC in place yet, which is part of the pre-alpha
limitation. The core datatypes are there, but many more will be added,

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

gerardc...@gmail.com (Gérard Côté) — Sat, 18 May 2013 17:07:49 UT

Hi Sod,

FYI, here is THE OFFICIAL developer's starting point where you will be able
to get all that is needed to start to install the software and code by
yourself to try it out quickly.

[link] (Just look at the README.MD at the
bottom of the page)

The specs, refered by Peter A Wood in his last reply will be useful to

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

sod.almig...@gmail.com (Sod Almighty) — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:46:53 UT

Fair enough.

I'm still not clear on the difference.

I'll check those out.

Righty ho. Does it also explain Red != Red/System?

You mean REBOL2 programs can be "compiled" into a single executable
containing the interpreter as well? I did not know this.

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

peterwaw...@gmail.com (Peter W A Wood) — Sat, 18 May 2013 02:24:08 UT

For me it means that you can expect not to have mysterious crashes, any crashes will be my own work.

There are a number of differences, the main one is that Red/System is a statically typed language with only low-level "commands", Red is like REBOL in that values are strongly typed but the words that refer to them (effectively variables) are not.

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

sod.almig...@gmail.com (Sod Almighty) — Sat, 18 May 2013 01:38:13 UT

Thank you.
I'm not familiar with that term. Is it a euphemism for "pretty much fully
working"? ;)
What is a "low-level dialect"? It's not clear to me how Red and Red/System
differ. Please explain.

Well, yeah, I didn't say it would be easy ;)
I've used C++ quite a bit in any case, so I could have a go at it.

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

sod.almig...@gmail.com (Sod Almighty) — Sat, 18 May 2013 01:32:45 UT

Do you mean there's no support for creating GUIs, or there's no IDE?

Hmm. I'd probably go for REBOL3 to begin with, unless I find something
totally borked. I assume Red and REBOL3 will be similar, like with 2?

Thank you.

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

peterwaw...@gmail.com (Peter W A Wood) — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:10:58 UT

Welcome.

Red is still very much an early stage Alpha, its low-level dialect Red-System is considered "production ready".

You could write Notepad in Red/System by directly calling Windows API functions though it would be equivalent of writing Notepad in C. The Red compiler, the Red interpreter, and the Red/System are not at all riddled with bugs. All bugs that are found or reported get fixed pretty quickly.

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

gr...@pointillistic.com (Gregg Irwin) — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:08:18 UT

GI> There is no GUI system for either yet.

I should correct that statement. There is no *native* GUI system yet.
Kej De Vos has created a GTK binding.

-- Gregg

Re: [red-lang] How usable is Red right now?

gr...@pointillistic.com (Gregg Irwin) — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:06:09 UT

Hi Stu,

Red is very pre-alpha. Red/System, the C-level dialect is in pretty
good shape though. There are a small number of bindings for libs, and
you can declare and call Windows API functions yourself. There is no
GUI system for either yet.

That said, you could play with REBOL2, which has all that, and was the

How usable is Red right now?

sod.almig...@gmail.com (Sod Almighty) — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:37:55 UT

Hi all. I'm new here.
Nice to see another native language being worked on. There are sadly so few
of them these days. I mean seriously, who the hell writes Windows
applications in Haskell, Fortran or Pascal these days? It's essentially C++
or nothing (well, I guess there's D, but it's full of bugs). I come mostly

Re: [red-lang] Red language overview

peterwaw...@gmail.com (Peter W A Wood) — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:29:59 UT

Memophen

You're correct the current document generator does focus on functions (in the main due to their ubiquity in the Red/REBOL world) to the exclusion of aliases and #defines. However, there are a couple of other reasons, the current bootstrap version of Red/System doesn't support DocStrings for aliases and #defines, and the syntax for #define is likely to be changed in the first Red-hosted version of Red/System (V 2.0). (See Wishes 8 and 15 in [link] ).

Re: [red-lang] Red language overview

arnoldv...@gmail.com (Arnold) — Mon, 13 May 2013 05:52:41 UT

Welcome Memophen,

Feel free to join the club.
One time we were all newbies in REBOL.
There are no programmers with 3+ years of experience in Red. You jumped on
the train at a beautiful moment, where you can see how it is being
constructed and get a very nice feel of the ride.
There are plenty of opportunities to add a little to Red in many ways.

Re: [red-lang] Red language overview

puik.p...@gmail.com (memophen) — Sun, 12 May 2013 20:19:10 UT

Peter (and whoever may read this),
I'm an almost complete newbie with respect to REBOL and Red. In this stage,
I don't want to interfere with the development of Red's documentation
tools. As far as I can see, the *generate-reds-api.r* script focuses on
functions. There's more than that, I imagined, so I decided to look inside

Re: [red-lang] Red language overview

peterwaw...@gmail.com (Peter W A Wood) — Sat, 11 May 2013 23:30:26 UT

The specification covers only the language not the functions that are provided with the languages. The intention is for API docs for the functions to be generated from the code base.

I'm sure it would. There is also an unfinished prototype "doc generator" in the Red/docs folder on Github that you may want to consider improving.